Saturday, May 3, 2008
Friday, May 2, 2008
Ahmedabad-Delhi....dirty...smelly..hot...Delhi
Ahmedabad turned out to be one of the friendliest cities we have visited in India... and also very clean for its size.
We arrived really early from our overnight "sleeper" bus from Diu which turned out to be in much worse condition then the one we took down there. The berth was covered in some old cheesy vinyl that was all cracked and was really irritating to lay down on.. but I guess that's why they supplied us with an old, musty, never been washed, carpet type of mat to sleep on...
The bus ride went pretty un eventfully... I didn't get a wink of sleep due to all of the rocking, bumping, slamming on breaks, and more then necessary rest stops... When we made it to the out skirts of Ahmedabad we saw that the bus we had hoped we were going to be on had gotten into a head on collision with a milk truck... The front end of the bus was completely smashed in and the milk truck was flipped on its' side with milk spilling everywhere...
The month of May turned out to be on the the deadliest ever for road crashes in the state of Gujarat. We heard on the news that night that more the 80 people were killed in the last 3 nights alone... Looks like someone was watching out for us again and there was probably a reason we got stuck on the dirtier bus rather then the one we had wanted...
Anyways we ended up going to the same hotel we stayed at the last time in Ahmedabad since it had fairly cheap a/c rooms and it was well over 100 degrees there... We spent most of the day trying to catch up on sleep. Although we did duck out a few times to get some food and to wander around a bit. The people were all really friendly again and they all wanted to shake our hands and as where we were from. It's pretty fun to be the only westerners around when the people are so nice.
Since our flight back to Delhi left at the ungodly hour of 6:00 am I tried to get the desk clerk at our hotel to arrange a rickshaw to be waiting for us at 3:30 am to take us to the airport. He didn't speak very good English and despite trying to convey my request many of times I was only met with the Indian "head wobble".. Which is sort of a shaking of the head up and down and side to side all at the same time and can mean anything from a "yes" to "no" or "I know what you are saying" or even an "I'm happy to see you"... Needless to say I went to bed that night a little stressed out about how we were going to get to the airport...
Woke up at 3:00 am the next morning and made our way past the hotel staff (who all sleep in the lobby of the hotel) and found that the front door was pretty securely shut... luckily it was locked from the inside and after a little bit of a struggle we managed to get it open and found a rickshaw waiting for us!
The rest of the trip back to Delhi was pretty uneventful. We made it to the hotel where we had left a lot of our luggage and were relieved to find it all still there.. and we ended up staying a few nights in that same hotel again.
We've been doing quite a bit of exploring around Delhi despite the fact that it is usually well over 110 degrees and the pollution is worse then ever. There is thick layer of black soot that covers everything in Delhi and despite the fact everyone tries to sweep, mop, burn, and splash water on it nothing seems to get anything clean around here. A waiter will wipe off a table just before you sit down to eat and by the time your food has come you can already notice the layer of blackness beginning to settle again. The sky is also tinged a brownish grey color which is much worse then any of the smog I've ever seen. If you wipe the sweat off of your forehead you will notice that it too is mostly the brownish black color... and too add to the constant belting of fumes of the rickshaws, buses, burning trash and feces...people also use a lot of gas powered generators here due to the power cuts that happen so often and come with out warning...
All of this has become really irritating to my lungs and I'm experiencing asthma symptoms I haven't had in over 10 years.. I can't go outside for more then an hr with out needing my inhaler and I wake up every couple of hours with a coughing fit at night... between the not being able to breathe and the heat I've been a little bit more irritable lately...
Luckily we switched hotels yesterday and scored a nice room with a mini fridge and a/c and a TV so I can retreat there when the heat outside is just too much. I actually slept almost the whole night through last night and felt much more energized today...
Today was supposed to be a big shopping spree day but we awoke to find all the shops and restaurants closed for some sort of a "strike".. It's kind of like being back in Nepal all over again. We managed to find a restaurant that was open and while we were eating the staff started running around and closing the metal doors to the outside as did any other shop that was open on the street.. Turns out the party which was imposing the strike was marching down the road and they have been known to beat anyone who is found to be out or conducting business during a strike..
Despite the fact that it seems every shop around is closed we can't really find any news anywhere about why the strike is being imposed or who is imposing it... just a crowd of people who come marching down the road every once and a while chanting some sort of slogan or something in Hindi...
So we may just end up spending the rest of the day in the Hotel room watching Hindi films or some old movies from the states... Depending on how things pan out...
Only 4 more days left on the other side of the world and then we are headed home!
We arrived really early from our overnight "sleeper" bus from Diu which turned out to be in much worse condition then the one we took down there. The berth was covered in some old cheesy vinyl that was all cracked and was really irritating to lay down on.. but I guess that's why they supplied us with an old, musty, never been washed, carpet type of mat to sleep on...
The bus ride went pretty un eventfully... I didn't get a wink of sleep due to all of the rocking, bumping, slamming on breaks, and more then necessary rest stops... When we made it to the out skirts of Ahmedabad we saw that the bus we had hoped we were going to be on had gotten into a head on collision with a milk truck... The front end of the bus was completely smashed in and the milk truck was flipped on its' side with milk spilling everywhere...
The month of May turned out to be on the the deadliest ever for road crashes in the state of Gujarat. We heard on the news that night that more the 80 people were killed in the last 3 nights alone... Looks like someone was watching out for us again and there was probably a reason we got stuck on the dirtier bus rather then the one we had wanted...
Anyways we ended up going to the same hotel we stayed at the last time in Ahmedabad since it had fairly cheap a/c rooms and it was well over 100 degrees there... We spent most of the day trying to catch up on sleep. Although we did duck out a few times to get some food and to wander around a bit. The people were all really friendly again and they all wanted to shake our hands and as where we were from. It's pretty fun to be the only westerners around when the people are so nice.
Since our flight back to Delhi left at the ungodly hour of 6:00 am I tried to get the desk clerk at our hotel to arrange a rickshaw to be waiting for us at 3:30 am to take us to the airport. He didn't speak very good English and despite trying to convey my request many of times I was only met with the Indian "head wobble".. Which is sort of a shaking of the head up and down and side to side all at the same time and can mean anything from a "yes" to "no" or "I know what you are saying" or even an "I'm happy to see you"... Needless to say I went to bed that night a little stressed out about how we were going to get to the airport...
Woke up at 3:00 am the next morning and made our way past the hotel staff (who all sleep in the lobby of the hotel) and found that the front door was pretty securely shut... luckily it was locked from the inside and after a little bit of a struggle we managed to get it open and found a rickshaw waiting for us!
The rest of the trip back to Delhi was pretty uneventful. We made it to the hotel where we had left a lot of our luggage and were relieved to find it all still there.. and we ended up staying a few nights in that same hotel again.
We've been doing quite a bit of exploring around Delhi despite the fact that it is usually well over 110 degrees and the pollution is worse then ever. There is thick layer of black soot that covers everything in Delhi and despite the fact everyone tries to sweep, mop, burn, and splash water on it nothing seems to get anything clean around here. A waiter will wipe off a table just before you sit down to eat and by the time your food has come you can already notice the layer of blackness beginning to settle again. The sky is also tinged a brownish grey color which is much worse then any of the smog I've ever seen. If you wipe the sweat off of your forehead you will notice that it too is mostly the brownish black color... and too add to the constant belting of fumes of the rickshaws, buses, burning trash and feces...people also use a lot of gas powered generators here due to the power cuts that happen so often and come with out warning...
All of this has become really irritating to my lungs and I'm experiencing asthma symptoms I haven't had in over 10 years.. I can't go outside for more then an hr with out needing my inhaler and I wake up every couple of hours with a coughing fit at night... between the not being able to breathe and the heat I've been a little bit more irritable lately...
Luckily we switched hotels yesterday and scored a nice room with a mini fridge and a/c and a TV so I can retreat there when the heat outside is just too much. I actually slept almost the whole night through last night and felt much more energized today...
Today was supposed to be a big shopping spree day but we awoke to find all the shops and restaurants closed for some sort of a "strike".. It's kind of like being back in Nepal all over again. We managed to find a restaurant that was open and while we were eating the staff started running around and closing the metal doors to the outside as did any other shop that was open on the street.. Turns out the party which was imposing the strike was marching down the road and they have been known to beat anyone who is found to be out or conducting business during a strike..
Despite the fact that it seems every shop around is closed we can't really find any news anywhere about why the strike is being imposed or who is imposing it... just a crowd of people who come marching down the road every once and a while chanting some sort of slogan or something in Hindi...
So we may just end up spending the rest of the day in the Hotel room watching Hindi films or some old movies from the states... Depending on how things pan out...
Only 4 more days left on the other side of the world and then we are headed home!
Saturday, April 26, 2008
Ahmedabad-Diu-Ahmedabad
It turns out taking the bus her in India was a lot more comfortable then the 18 hr bus we took across Nepal...
We had booked a "sleeper" bus from Ahmedabad to Diu and not really knowing what it was we were pleasantly surprised to have quite a large upper berth for both Teresa and I to sleep on the 10 hr ride to Diu. It ended up being an upper berth which basically felt like we were riding on the roof of the bus the whole time and you could really feel the bus lean from side to side as it weaved in and out of traffic and felt like we were going to go flipping over quite a few times... So we slept on and off for most of the night between waking up so honking horns, screeching brakes, and bumping up an down...
When we arrived in Diu we got a rickshaw to take us over to a little hotel called "Sea Village resort," which is locate about 2 km outside of the actual town and over looks a secluded little cove. The rooms are all detached bungalow type rooms and I think that they actually were once large shipping containers. They all were pretty dirty and with out hot water, or even a shower for that matter, but the price is really really cheap and we were literally a few feet from the ocean. One really nice feature is that we had a really large porch which we probably spent the majority of time here just sitting on and watching the ocean.
The town of Diu is really pretty small and is located on the Western side of the island. It has a huge fort to the southern end, which we spent a day exploring, and is blocked off from the rest of the island by a huge wall with a moat around it that is left over from when the Portuguese settled here. The streets are all tiny and windy like the rest of India but here they are really clean and it feels more like a European town especially with all the Portuguese influenced architecture.. There are also a lot of churches instead of Hindu temples which were pretty neat to explore and all of the statues of the saints looked very different then the ones in the Catholic churches back home.
Being that our hotel was sort of out of the way and it gets really too hot to be walking all over the island we rented a little scooter to get around. It was a little nerve wracking at first, especially driving through town with all the cows, people, motorcycles, rickshaws, buses, etc.. to dodge. But once we made it out of town the rest of the island is pretty deserted and we had the roads mostly to our selves. I thought we were a spectacle before just walking around town with people always pointing and talking or staring.. but you should have seen it when they saw two white people driving around on a scooter..
Our days here in Diu basically went something like this... Wake up between 8am and noon and ride the scooter or walk into town for breakfast. Come back and lay on the beach and swim for a few hrs. Have a nice little snack and possibly a beer. Then we'd go back to laying on the beach or go exploring the island on the scooter to some of the other beaches, forts, or villages. Followed by some more laying around. Then we'd go back into town for some dinner, which I think I got sea food every night, and then go to bed and do it all again the next day.
Since our beach was pretty well secluded from the rest of the island it's where most of the westerners can go and swim with out being hassled by the drunk Indian men that are on the rest of the island. We made it up to Nagoa beach one afternoon to explore and found it almost unbearable having to deal with that many Indians who don't know how to handle their alcohol and we found ourselves having to yell at people from coming up and staring awkwardly at Teresa and from taking photos. For every 1 western girl there on the beach there was at least 50 drunk Indian men surrounding them taking pictures and staring... We decided to stick to our beach for the rest of the week.
We also drove the scooter across the island to a small fishing village on the eastern part of the island and it was really neat to explore. Although about half way there the scooter got a flat tire and we had to drive all the way back and find a puncture shop to fix the tire...which was an experience..When we finally made it over to the town it had a very laid back feel to it and there were entire forests of palm trees. There were dozens of ships being built around the town out of huge planks of wood. Everyone seemed really friendly but we still don't know any Gujarati so we didn't really understand what they were saying to us. Our plan was to hang out at a beach near the town that was supposedly always deserted but when we got there we found it to have quite a few people there and were greeted by a guy taking a crap right in front of us... so we retreated back to our little beach once again...
Today we are catching a sleeper bus back to Ahmedabad and we have a flight back to Delhi on the day after that and we are both pretty sad to go... This part of the trip really has been more of a "vacation" from traveling with out a lot of hassles and the whole island is actually pretty clean compared to the rest of India...
When we get back to Delhi on the 28th we only have about 8 days left before we fly to London so we don't really know what we are going to do.. probably just some day trips from Delhi to some of the museums and interesting things in the city. The whole country is becoming almost unbearably hot this time of year and there aren't a lot of tourists left so hopefully we can get some good deals on hotels and souvenirs...
We had booked a "sleeper" bus from Ahmedabad to Diu and not really knowing what it was we were pleasantly surprised to have quite a large upper berth for both Teresa and I to sleep on the 10 hr ride to Diu. It ended up being an upper berth which basically felt like we were riding on the roof of the bus the whole time and you could really feel the bus lean from side to side as it weaved in and out of traffic and felt like we were going to go flipping over quite a few times... So we slept on and off for most of the night between waking up so honking horns, screeching brakes, and bumping up an down...
When we arrived in Diu we got a rickshaw to take us over to a little hotel called "Sea Village resort," which is locate about 2 km outside of the actual town and over looks a secluded little cove. The rooms are all detached bungalow type rooms and I think that they actually were once large shipping containers. They all were pretty dirty and with out hot water, or even a shower for that matter, but the price is really really cheap and we were literally a few feet from the ocean. One really nice feature is that we had a really large porch which we probably spent the majority of time here just sitting on and watching the ocean.
The town of Diu is really pretty small and is located on the Western side of the island. It has a huge fort to the southern end, which we spent a day exploring, and is blocked off from the rest of the island by a huge wall with a moat around it that is left over from when the Portuguese settled here. The streets are all tiny and windy like the rest of India but here they are really clean and it feels more like a European town especially with all the Portuguese influenced architecture.. There are also a lot of churches instead of Hindu temples which were pretty neat to explore and all of the statues of the saints looked very different then the ones in the Catholic churches back home.
Being that our hotel was sort of out of the way and it gets really too hot to be walking all over the island we rented a little scooter to get around. It was a little nerve wracking at first, especially driving through town with all the cows, people, motorcycles, rickshaws, buses, etc.. to dodge. But once we made it out of town the rest of the island is pretty deserted and we had the roads mostly to our selves. I thought we were a spectacle before just walking around town with people always pointing and talking or staring.. but you should have seen it when they saw two white people driving around on a scooter..
Our days here in Diu basically went something like this... Wake up between 8am and noon and ride the scooter or walk into town for breakfast. Come back and lay on the beach and swim for a few hrs. Have a nice little snack and possibly a beer. Then we'd go back to laying on the beach or go exploring the island on the scooter to some of the other beaches, forts, or villages. Followed by some more laying around. Then we'd go back into town for some dinner, which I think I got sea food every night, and then go to bed and do it all again the next day.
Since our beach was pretty well secluded from the rest of the island it's where most of the westerners can go and swim with out being hassled by the drunk Indian men that are on the rest of the island. We made it up to Nagoa beach one afternoon to explore and found it almost unbearable having to deal with that many Indians who don't know how to handle their alcohol and we found ourselves having to yell at people from coming up and staring awkwardly at Teresa and from taking photos. For every 1 western girl there on the beach there was at least 50 drunk Indian men surrounding them taking pictures and staring... We decided to stick to our beach for the rest of the week.
We also drove the scooter across the island to a small fishing village on the eastern part of the island and it was really neat to explore. Although about half way there the scooter got a flat tire and we had to drive all the way back and find a puncture shop to fix the tire...which was an experience..When we finally made it over to the town it had a very laid back feel to it and there were entire forests of palm trees. There were dozens of ships being built around the town out of huge planks of wood. Everyone seemed really friendly but we still don't know any Gujarati so we didn't really understand what they were saying to us. Our plan was to hang out at a beach near the town that was supposedly always deserted but when we got there we found it to have quite a few people there and were greeted by a guy taking a crap right in front of us... so we retreated back to our little beach once again...
Today we are catching a sleeper bus back to Ahmedabad and we have a flight back to Delhi on the day after that and we are both pretty sad to go... This part of the trip really has been more of a "vacation" from traveling with out a lot of hassles and the whole island is actually pretty clean compared to the rest of India...
When we get back to Delhi on the 28th we only have about 8 days left before we fly to London so we don't really know what we are going to do.. probably just some day trips from Delhi to some of the museums and interesting things in the city. The whole country is becoming almost unbearably hot this time of year and there aren't a lot of tourists left so hopefully we can get some good deals on hotels and souvenirs...
Friday, April 25, 2008
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