Ah I’ve been a bit lazy, no blogs for two months. Mark tells me people have emailed to complain about the lack of news, but I don’t actually believe him, I think he’s just trying to guilt me into getting my butt into gear, and also showing off because he’s uploaded a zillion photo’s onto his blog page.
What have we been up to? Well, since Hampi we’ve been to Kerala, the bottom of India, through Tamil Nadu to a place that is sooo amazing we aren’t actually going to talk about it because we think we deserve one secret spot, and then Kolkatta, Bodhgaya (the place where Buddha found enlightenment) and finally where we are now, Varanasi.
What can I say. Kerala was a real highlight for me. It’s meant to be the most educated state in India, and it certainly felt like the most sophisticated and the cleanest state. It really did offer in one nice neat package a good taste of India from spice and tea plantations to beautiful beaches, safaris (though it’s still India so you don’t actually see anything). We went canoeing through the backwaters and took boats across half the state. If you didn’t have much time in India but wanted to get a really good taste minus a lot of the hassle, for my mind, come to Kerala.
The tip of India was, frankly, terrible. Don’t bother.
In Tamil Nadu we went to Madurai to visit the biggest temple in India. WOW! This was our favourite temple even before we stumbled across a festival for Kali the destruction goddess which is held every four years. The temple had a statue for every hindu god (which we seem to remember being around the 10,000 mark). It was beautifully decorated and the people were typically India so very proud of their culture and religion and very keen to share information on everything. For the Kali festival all of the local women made some sort of weird rice flour, sugar and butter concoction. Poor Mark was force feed about a kilo of the stuff, while I hid in the corner to avoid a food baby.
The secret place was amazing, and if you email us, we may just tell you where it is. All I’ll say was it’s heaven on earth.
Kolkata was kind of cool, there wasn’t a hell of a lot of sights to see which always sends Mark bananas and the men were pretty aggressive which I don’t love. In fact at one point I had to flag down a police officer to get rid of some men for me, but had beautiful old colonial architecture and a fun vibe.
Bodhgaya was really cool. It’s basically a huge town set up around the sight where Buddha found enlightenment. Buddhist countries from across the world each had a temple there and we had a great time going from temple to temple checking out the various types of architecture and giggling at the ‘no sleeping in the temple’ signs until we realised that the area was so poor that homeless people would sit in the temples to hide from the heat or the monsoon.
Now we’re in Varanasi but I’ll save that for another day because I’m running out of battery and you’re probably a bit bored!
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