Much less ranting in this post. We promise! India, unsurprisingly, is still noisey and smelly but we're properly settling into the way of life over here.
The bird sanctuary in Bharatpur was actually pretty impressive, although the locals did think we were a little strange for insisting to walk 16km through the midday sun, but you know what they say about mad dogs and Englishmen. We've seen plenty of amazing sites over the last few days including the Taj Mahal and the Red Fort in Agra (we actually, and rather controversially, preferred the Red Fort), Fatehpur Sikri just outside of Bharatpur, and the Pink City and the Amber Fort in Jaipur. We also attended our first Bollywood film in a 1500 seat cinema, which was completely full to the brim. We've have never experienced anything like it! The whole cinema erupts into applause, whooping and in some cases crying. It's as if the audience were actually inside the film. It was very funny. If you're interested the film was called 'The Rockstar,' and we thoroughly recommend it, at least we think we do having not understood absolutely all of what was going on.
We have a 19hour train journey out of Jaipur tomorrow and just under 1000km after departure we will be in Varanasi, possibly India's most spiritual city. Things could have been worse, as getting tickets has been a complete nightmare and we had started to consider getting a bus instead. But alas, we managed to get some last minute release tickets yesterday morning. The only tickets they had left were first class. We're totally gutted! According to the Rough Guide Varanasi has India's second most accomplished group of touts and con-men, but after settling in we're definitely up for round two and are feeling much more confident.
Gemma's got some last minute shopping to do in the Pink City tomorrow, which means that Ben also has some last minute shopping in the Pink City too!
We tried to upload some photos, but that only proved to crash the computer (this is in fact the second time we've written this blog) so we will attempt this another time. Hope you are all well.
Ben and Gem x
The bird sanctuary in Bharatpur was actually pretty impressive, although the locals did think we were a little strange for insisting to walk 16km through the midday sun, but you know what they say about mad dogs and Englishmen. We've seen plenty of amazing sites over the last few days including the Taj Mahal and the Red Fort in Agra (we actually, and rather controversially, preferred the Red Fort), Fatehpur Sikri just outside of Bharatpur, and the Pink City and the Amber Fort in Jaipur. We also attended our first Bollywood film in a 1500 seat cinema, which was completely full to the brim. We've have never experienced anything like it! The whole cinema erupts into applause, whooping and in some cases crying. It's as if the audience were actually inside the film. It was very funny. If you're interested the film was called 'The Rockstar,' and we thoroughly recommend it, at least we think we do having not understood absolutely all of what was going on.
We have a 19hour train journey out of Jaipur tomorrow and just under 1000km after departure we will be in Varanasi, possibly India's most spiritual city. Things could have been worse, as getting tickets has been a complete nightmare and we had started to consider getting a bus instead. But alas, we managed to get some last minute release tickets yesterday morning. The only tickets they had left were first class. We're totally gutted! According to the Rough Guide Varanasi has India's second most accomplished group of touts and con-men, but after settling in we're definitely up for round two and are feeling much more confident.
Gemma's got some last minute shopping to do in the Pink City tomorrow, which means that Ben also has some last minute shopping in the Pink City too!
We tried to upload some photos, but that only proved to crash the computer (this is in fact the second time we've written this blog) so we will attempt this another time. Hope you are all well.
Ben and Gem x
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