Taylor’s slightly more tardy but much higher quality pictures

Taiwan

Thailand

Delhi-Round One

Haridwar-Rishikesh

Chandigarh-part 1

Chandigarh-part 2

Shimla

Mandi

Manali

McLeod Ganj-Dharamsala

Triund-Snowline-Near Death

Pathankot-Amritsar-Wagah

Agra-Red Fort

Agra-Taj Mahal

Flight Home

Sean’s Tardy Photos

Below are the links, via facebook, for all of the pictures that I took for the duration of my travels. Do enjoy and sorry that they took so long. They are organized in order.

Getting There

One Long Day

Delhi (There and Back Again)

Into the Mountains

The Temple of the Monkey King

The Road North

Onward to Exile

Punjabi Plains and the Golden Temple

Toeing Rivalries on the Pakistani Border

Day-tripping Agra

Shadow of the Magnificent Taj

Wrapping it All Up!

Numbers

8101.25 miles between Phoenix and New Delhi

1 car ride about 400 miles

5 flights over international borders

1 domestic flight

15 bus tickets

4 train rides

countless auto rickshaws and more bicycle rickshaws

an unimpressive sounding amount of miles walked, but it was actually a lot

TOTAL = 19532.75 miles as the bird flies + walking and rickshaws

Leaving Delhi

We have spent the last two days in Delhi and are now looking at the end of our adventure. The last few days have been spent seeing the sights here in Delhi and just taking it all in before the epic flight home. This entire trip has been truly amazing and it wouldn’t have been entirely possible without the support of you all back home. Unfortunately for you all, I have become blog-weary (not so much I suppose to not make up my own words). Then time for reflection on this great trip in its whole along with pictures shall be reserved for home. I am probably more excited than you to see how exactly my pictures turned out. I thank you for your patience.

We leave tomorrow morning for the airport and then for home, so we will be seeing you all very soon on mother soil.

Wonders

The Taj Mahal is pretty much on every list of the Wonders of the World. And it truely deserves it. I am so in awe that I am completely unable to attempt to justify it on the site at this time.

Hope that all is quite well at home, as we will be back there later this week. More posts to come before that…

The Burbs

We are now back in Delhi, despite any worries that we may have had about the difficulty of such a journey. We are staying very close to where we stayed our first time around in this city, although it has a distinctly different feel to it now that we have been traveling a bit. Our first time in Delhi, while we enjoyed it, was like being through to the wolves; there was no transition period, no easing into things. It was good for us, but now that we are back with some India under our belts, we can start to really enjoy ourselves. So much so that today we were struck with inspiration and decided to journey into the forbidden void…the area off our books maps: the Delhi suburbs. It was actually quite an experience driven initially by our desire to see the new Indiana Jones movie. Delhi is currently building a pretty extensive Metro system and luckily for us, a stop is located very near the hotel/guest house that we are in and that there was (or so we were told) one very near the place we wanted to go. The exact stops name was a point of contention between a few people, but eventually a place was decided on. The Metro weaved its way through a large portion of the city, which is mostly concrete apartment style buildings only a few stories tall at best. The streets are lined with shops and food stalls and trash, etc. The Metro momentarily puts you above all that, gives you some perspective on the size and expanse that is Delhi. The Metro itself is very state-of-the-art and air conditioned and what not. By 2010 it is supposed to run through most of the city to alleviate a lot of the congestion that the city suffers from.

Eventually we arrived at our destination. I had expected a mall of sorts but not three to five (depending on how you separate them, i did so based on the check points we had to go through) malls of Christtown-size (a medium-sized mall in Phoenix). The security in suburbia is comparable only to the Red Fort with its fortified machine gun posts. We had to pass through a bag search and then be felt up each time we entered a new mall layer. Small shops, although often empty and over employed, often insisted that we leave or stuff at the door, with their own private security man. The malls themselves were pretty typical but we were able to find something special. Per a special friend of ours, Mike Norman, we found a TGI Fridays, but have, since his post, become so culturally emersed that the thought of going their is disguisting (much like the US). After much searching the movie theater was found and the ticket bought (at a competitive Rs 150 each). It seemed somewhat fitting to see Indiana Jones in India for some reason, despite the fact that this film doesn’t leave the Western Hemisphere (sorry for the spoiler I suppose). We both liked it with a few personal reservations each.

The day itself was an interesting although very nice day. It was nice and a bit well deserved to find a place filled with air conditioning as a brief respite from the Delhi heat.

Bridging Borders

Today was quite the day. This morning we went to the Golden Temple, the holy temple of the Sikhs. It was quite a sight. We had to check our shoes and bags (separately, naturally) before entering the grounds. Our heads also had to be covered with handkerchiefs. We were pretty thug. We have some great pictures, although potentially inappropriate or sacreligious. We were guided around by a a child which helped get us through a bit of the ceremony of the whole thing, involving some kind of sacrificial food. He also made us look slightly less out of place walking through areas were people were praying or worshiping or just listening to the signing/reading of the holy book(s?).

We also went to the Wagah border, one of the few over road border crossings between India and its neighbor, Pakistan. As you may have heard there is a bit of rivalry/tension between these two nations. However, here at Wagah, the gloves come off. Every evening the border is closed with much pomp and circumstance. The two rivals stare at each other over two separate, but equal, fences. The entire festivity is watched within a stadium divided in half by the border fence. Each side is thus a home side. A great deal of stomping and parading follows, which each side going crazy. The entire thing was in Urdu/Hindi, so we didn’t really understand. However, in one of those universally human moments, when the opposing side yelled “Pakistan,” a man behind me would yell the equivalent of SUCKS! followed by the laughter of his compatriots. Took me back to high school basketball. To add to the excitement, it was raining most of the time.

The whole day was filled with interesting cultural experiences. Overall, Amritsar has been pretty good to us, although the cycle rickshaw people here are particularly aggressive. We leave this town at like 5am and will be on our way back to Delhi to bring our journey full circle.

Patience is a virtue

Sean and I had an interesting day today.  We came to Amritsar a bit late yesterday and so couldn’t really afford to shop around too much for a hotel and so we are staying at the Tourist Guest House.  Telling a bicycle rickshaw driver that you want to go to the Tourist Guest House will usually take you on a short ride to the hotel that is paying them the most for them to take you there.  By some grace of God we got a rickshaw driver who knew exactly where we wanted to go and took us there rather promptly.  We of course thought we were going to die in the back of this rickshaw has the man peddled with all his might and we went just over walking speed as cars, motorcycles, donkeys and every other creature from Noah’s Ark went rushing by us.  I will tell you honestly, there is nothing as emasculating as riding on the back of a bicycle rickshaw holding on for dear life, but as is life. We were blessed with staying in the penthouse suite at our hotel, as in Tower of London, Rapunzel, we are un-Godly hot right now penthouse suite.  In typical fashion the air-conditioner is broken and we cannot change the channel or volume on our TV.  Sean and I foresaw a long night of laying wide awake staring at the empty, eerily empty I’ll have you know, walls until the sun rose.  By some benevolence we were both able to get a good amount of sleep.  We read in our travel books that the Ritz hotel allowed non-residents use of their pool and so we made a B-line straight there once it began to heat up.  This was quite an interesting place, by that I mean it was the worst looking Ritz either of us had ever seen but it did have a pool, and they did let us in it, and it was very refreshing.  Then we went to the train station.  The train station in India is an experience.  If you could imagine a world where lines are forgotten, common sense is no more and a mob mentality reigns supreme.  For any of you Hobbes-eans out there the train station in India is the closest thing to the state of nature.  The only other metaphor I can think of is a one William Golding’s Lord of the Flies.  We might have to have a post dedicated just to the train station.  But needless to say we got our train tickets back to Delhi on Friday and that is all that matters.  Tomorrow we are off to see the Golden Temple and hopefully see the border ceremony.  We hope all is well back home and miss you all dearly.

Back in the Saddle

We are certainly out of the Himalayas now. Yesterday there was essentially nothing to report as we stayed in Dharamsala for another day as that morning there was quite a storm that rolled in. The lightening was centered just over the city and quite a sight in combination with the torrential rain. The only thing moving in the street was a solitary cow. Anyway after taking a redux day of rest, which was marvelous by the way, we decided that Chamba would be too out of the way to reach and not be cutting it close for getting back to Delhi with enough time to spare (have to leave something to come back for, eh?) Anyway, we decided to take the eight or so hour bus trip down to Amritsar through Pathenkot and rural-ish Punjab. Leaving the mountains immediately led to a sharp increase in temperature. As soon as we entered Punjab, the air around us grew stale and hot, with the breeze coming in threw the open windows only stifling us further. It was quite a trip. Pathenkot is a large military town with the base dominating the entire city. Little else is noticable, except the car dealerships that worked their way between various fortified gates. It was an interesting town. We moved on to Amritsar in a very tightly packed, but constantly rotating group of people. I myslef had three different people sleep on me as the drive went by. It was quite a day and we are taking a bit of a rest. That is all for now. I’d like to take this opportunity to thank all of you yet again for reading this whole thing. Its great for us to collect these thoughts as we go for both your and our own sake. We both hope that things are going splendidly back home (even if the temperatures are probably rising). HAve a wonderful dy until we post again.

The Lord’s Day

It is Sunday here which means, for those who have fallen from the holy path, was decreed to be the Lord’s holy day of rest. And we took that at face value, so sure, as it was much deserved and much needed. We have spent most of the day sleeping, hiding from the sun and in my case, reading anything that I could get my hands on. A month-old Economist has taken the punishment for that. The plan to is potentially leave the land of the monks and head for Chamba tomorrow, but we shall see where the road takes us.

The most interesting (and unsuspectingly abusive) thing to have happened to me in the last two days, beside the hike which I have yielded to Taylor to describe, was an event that resulted from my commitment to at long last rid myself of the mountain beard that had been building up on my face for about five days. Whether it be the mountain air, the holiness of these altitudes or just plain manliness (probably a combination of the three), my beard had grown too fast for my devilish good looks to keep up. Normally, my decision to get rid of this sinister growth doesn’t warrant this type of fan fare. However, upon seeing a local barber/straight shaver, I couldn’t resist the temptation to get a real shave. I entered the establishment, sat myself before someone I deeply considered an artist and opened myself up to this man’s whims. With a single dollop of homemade cream, followed by about ten minutes of lathering, my face of ready, each hair standing on end. The shave itself was pretty uneventful, even with the abrasive first impact of the razor to skin. It was the closest shave I have ever had in my life. The next part, which Taylor conveniently showed up for to video, the barber asked in a mumbled tone if I wanted……. So opened by the current cultural experience that I didn’t even considered what he said, quite foolishly. Immediately, he began to beat my face (massaging is far to mild, too civilized). It lasted about ten minutes at which point quickly lifted my head and said thanks to which he threw more lotion on my face and began again. At the end of it, red-eyed and bloated I paid the man and walked away with an aching neck. But a baby face.