Absolute Agra

So many people don't like this city. Maybe it's because they create an Agra myth in their minds, which ends up being impossible to correspond with real life. But we didn't come with much expectation and actually kind of like it here. Well, let's start from the beginning.

View of the Taj from a water mirror

Traveling from Kajuraho to here, we didn't get a place in the sleeper class train and ended up traveling in the so-called general class. Which was not that bad in the beginning, but got really crowded after a few stations. Luckily, we found a Japanese guy and a group of four young Koreans, and we all stuck up together for the entire trip, otherwise we would have been smashed by the horde of people. There were people everywhere, laying on the floor (impossible to even go to the toilette), sleeping on top with the luggage, sleeping in groups of 3 in a 1 person seat, I mean... hell! Our train was supposed to arrive at 2 am, so it arrived at 3:30 am and we headed straight to the hotel we'd already made a reservation. Always good to have an Indian sim-card and a Lonely Planet.

Full train

Our first day in Agra we did as much as nothing: we only stayed in bed, slept till 11am, had breakfast in the nice rooftop restaurant with Taj view, then went to bed again and slept till 4:30 pm. We then finally went for a walk and some food, bought souvenirs and had a weird story with a camel driver... well, we can tell it to you guys in person, but at least we can say we got pictures on top of a camel.


Coming back home in a cycle rickshaw, the driver (or do I say rider?) was so tired we thought he would die, so we asked him to seat in the back and Joao drove the rickshaw for a couple of 100 meters... we still gave the man more money than agreed though. It was a funny experience to ride a rickshaw - this shit is fucking heavy! In that same night, our friend Pan (you know her from Kolkata) arrived in Agra and spent the night in a mattress in our hotel. It was a great feeling to meet someone we already knew and we spent most of the night just talking about all the different topics. That was great.

Impressions of Agra

Due to the fact that the Taj is closed on Fridays, we went yesterday to Fathepur Sikkri, a ghost town near Agra, muslim building with a mosquee, great place, where we met Seth, an american guy who lives in Mumbai and joined us in our adventure. It was a great day and we have lots of pictures of it! :)

Kids in Fatehpur Sikkri (who wanted to kiss me!)

Fatehpur Sikkri

So this morning, in our 3rd day, we finally went to see the Taj Mahal. How it was: well, fucking expensive! It's beautiful and impressive, but not much more than a beautiful building. The thing about the Taj s not that it is nicer, the thing is that it is the Taj, and if you already paid a lot and traveled this far to come to India, it's really worth to see it. Isn't it? Wait for more pictures!

Kajuraho: Kama Sutra Temples

Wow, what a great place! And this doesn't have any sexual connotation, I swear! Kajuraho was a great surprise, specially after Lumbini. We thought this would also be a place in the middle of nowhere with no infrastructure, but we got really impressed by the town itself!

We're staying in the nice hotel since our trip started for very little money! Since we arrived with 4 other people and needed 4 rooms, the guys gave us a super discount and we ended up only paying 250 Rupees (something like 4 euros) for a very pleasant room with the cleanest toilet we've seen in India and cable TV (no matter by the fact that 99% of the channels are in Hindi). They have a nice restaurant, good value food, yoga and massage sessions - which Joao tried yesterday and liked very much - and the staff is so nice and friendly we wish we could stay here longer and simply rest. Which will be not possible, since our time is starting to become short.

Well, what to say about the temples? They are amazing! Forget everything you've seen about medieval art: this thing really rocks!!! The art is amazing to see, even independently of the fact that we're talking about sexual sculptures! The complex where the major temples are is simply gorgeous and one could spend hours just admiring the beauty of them! :)

Now let's talk about sex. Nobody really knows what these illustrations might represent. What are the sexual images really for? Some say it was made in honor of a Goddess who had kinda "voyeur" habits, others that they represent Tantra and the balance between bodily pleasure and spiritual tranquility, others say that they reflect the society of that time. Really?! Amazing to relate them with actual India, where women have to cover their bodies and have no rights, where men seem to have fun only when they are among themselves and sexuality seems to have died long, long ago.

Yes, I made a lot of pictures, so all you guys who want to see them can just come to have a coffee with us in our apartment as soon as we get home! The sexual positions are amazing, and sometimes it's hard to figure out where a body stops and the other one starts. How creative those artists were! Interestingly, the temples are not only made of sexual sculptures, but also... surprise!... sculptures representing war. Lonely Planet says that people who built those temples were making war every time they were not inventing new, strange sexual positions... ;) Let's make love, not war, guys, they seem to say.

We can't avoid thinking about the Englishman who found the temples in the middle of the forest one hundred years ago! I hope he wasn't a conservative gu y! :)

PS:

Concerning your comments on our Facebook page(s): No, we didn't try them yet, but even if we do, I don't really believe a normal human body would be capable of doing that all!

Varanasi: welcome to India's most extreme place

And here we are... Varanasi/Benares or what else you can call this amazing city. Amazing in it's whole sense. How can someone describe the shock and the joy of being in Varanasi?

Street of our (amazingly nice) hotel

First of all, we loved it. Well, I loved it, but Joao liked it too. And we really wanted to stay longer, but our short remaining time doesn't allow us any more changes, so we had to take it or leave it the way it is.

Arriving in Varanasi is the same as arriving in any of India's major cities: the same fuzz, the same confusion of rickshaws and hotels and not knowing where to go or who to trust, nothing special at all :) at least nothing we hadn't learned to deal with. The only problem was that we've been traveling for the past couple of days with a group of tourists we met in Lumbini, and they had different plans about where to stay, wich caused some stress: main lesson - you better keep doing your own stuff and following your instincts about people/plans instead of leting other people decide for you! We learned it, but it was somehow a bit hard, because when we finally realised we didn't want to accept their agreement, the rickshaw kind of refused to take us back to the place we wanted to stay... lesson number two: choose CAREFULLY your travel mates, or you end up hating yourself/the mates :)

Anyway we managed it somehow and ended up alone again (better alone!) in a nice place close to a temple in Assi Gath, the southest Gath (= "place near the river", in other words where the people bath). It was a nice experience only to walk for 2 hours with no real destination through the Gaths and streets of Varanasi in a Sunday afternoon (someone told us it was Sunday), sometimes talking to people, sometimes giving sweets to the kids... and sometimes seeing a burning phyres or a corpse being thrown in the river... strangely, we were not schocked about that. We could have been in other circunstances, but not there, because in Varanasi death and life are straight related and they all form the beauty of this strange city.

People in a Gath

This doesn't mean we would come to the extreme of touching the Ganges water. Okay, this is holly water, but not holly enough for us to come closer. It's strangely not smelly, but we know how dirty it is.

Man washing clothes in the Ganges

In Varanasi other strange, great thing happened: we met Victoria and Johan, the Brazilian/French couple we've already met in Sikkim, just like this, as if it was the most normal thing in the universe to meet friends in a distant place. This was great! Specially because Johan took us to try the "pan" - this strange thing Indian men put oon their mouths and spit red on the floor. And we really liked it, because of the taste but also because suddenly we belonged to those who spit, instead of belonging to those who feel disgusted about it. That's India, and that's what we like here! :)


Here just some glimpses of our Varanasi experience:

- On Monday we woke up at 4:45 to do the Ganges boat trip, but since this was Shiva's Day (how lucky), we couldn't go to the Main Gath. Instead of it, we walked around while our boatman waited for us, and saw... a LOT of SNAKE CHARMERS! Yes, we finally found them, when we had already almost lost our hopes. They were everywhere, as well as their cobras, extremely beautiful and dangerous cobras... what a life!

Snake charmer

- Later while having breakfast with a group of Valencianos and a Mexican girl in a rooftop restaurant, we suddenly saw a big comotion near the river, and Joao went to see what was happening. A 20-years old guy had drown there, just in front of us, and has been rescued by some passing-by people. Well, Indian way: instead of cardiac massage and mouth to mouth, a "holy man" did a kind of a massage on his back... and the guy just died in front of us.

- In the afternoon, we came to see the main burning Gath, Manikarnika Gath, and this was surely a mistake. There's a mafia working there, catching up on tourists and taking their money. They are extremely aggressive and can be a real danger and there's no police around there. We had a really bad moment trying to escape them and didn't want to see the crematory anymore.

- In Manikarnika Gath we saw one of the most horrible images of our whole lives: a dog walking with an open skull, so that we could see his brain while he passed by, waiting to be eaten alive by the crows.

- But we also met a lot of extremely nice and welcoming people, honest people who talked to us, children that asked for money but that were nice and friendly even when they realised we wouldn't give them anything. We ate sweets sitting on the streets, had fresh juice like the locals, had a lot of laughs and strangely felt in love with this city lost in time, where you feel like 200b.C. (Joao says 2000 b.C., but I think he's exaggerating... ;)

Lumbini: Buddha's EXACT Birthplace

Lumbini will be a wonderful place in 30 years. Now it's only a bunch of temples being constructed in a huge green area, where you can also find a small, desperately no-men's-land-like village. That's the truth. We went there after a very long trip from Pokhara (as always, all the so-called "tourist buses, which are horrible, leave at around 6am. Getting up early is becoming a habit around here ;)


Anyway we had a long, hard trip (again), and then arrived in a place close to Sunauli (Indian border), from which we took a bus... and traveled in the rooftop... which requires some special skills, but ends up being more pleasant than going inside, since the heat and the many stops don't come along very well together.


Lumbini Bazar is a village made of only one street. There you can find a couple of hotels (all same, but all with extremely different prices) and only one restaurant, where you can't complain about the mixed-up orders or the slow service, since there's no concurrence.


But well, in Lumbini you have the "exact birthplace of Buddha", so they say, so there's a reason to stop by for one day, but not more...

Chitwan Natural Park - by Joao

After being stuck in Kathmandu for another day, we decided (in the last minute) to go to Chitwan rather than go directly to Pokhara.

That was probably one of the best choices we did in our journey. Chitwan is a natural park in the border with India, where you can find one-horned rhinos, 2 types of crocodiles and the legendary (but very rare) Royal Bengal Tiger.

Once you arrive in the little village of Sauraha (last bus stop) you find yourself in the middle of the jungle... well... at least very close. The only thing that separates the village from the park is the river where you sometimes can see crocodiles (so swimming isn't really recommended).
There are very nice hotels/bungalows, elephants walking in the streets, horses and camels everywhere... a very nice place to visit if you are looking for something more exotic.

Luckily we were able to find our Brazilian friends in the first day and spent the rest of the time together. We had a wonderful time and plenty of stories to tell. Like this one: people over there don't really speak English, so when our friend asked for FISH LEMON SAUCE, the boy working in the hotels restaurant very proudly brought a glass of FRESH LEMON JUICE, which took 1h30 to be prepared.

But its a place people really should visit... I mean... ELEPHANTS in the streets, isn't it amazing? the locals didn't think so... for them, they are just like... 5-tones motorbikes?

Wanna see it with your own eyes? take a look at our videos!

Pokhara

And we didn't want to go to Pokhara... what a mistake it would have been not to. It's true that we didn't intend to stay this much in the Himalayan area. But what to do when you just feel so great in a place that you don't want to move away?


Pokhara is one of the must-see cities in Nepal and we just arrived, but it seems to be perfect! A perfect place with a huge lake, nice people, silent streets ("blowing horn" forbidden, thank God!), plenty of good restaurants and nice spots to see. It's the most peaceful place we've been so far (despite of Chitwan, but this was a natural reserve in the middle of the jungle, so you can't compare!). From here we can do a lot of trekking, paragliding, etc., but also massage and rest... ;)


Our trip is going to be totally different than what we thought. The itinerary changed a lot and we are spending much more time in certain places than we actually wanted. I would even say we are a bit scared about going back to India... after all the stress in Kolkata, the people running after us, the loud, dirty streets, we are really enjoying the piece of quiet we have up here. But who wouldn't do the same?


I think the biggest mistake of people traveling to India/Asia is trying to cover a huge area in less time, like doing a world trip in 80 days or so. It's true that you have trains crossing the whole country, but they are so slow and crowded that no one could stand making long trips just to spend a night or two in each city.


On the other hand, traveling is really stressful and I start thinking I couldn't stand a (very) long trip, like more than 6 months away from home. I miss Western food, I miss organization, I miss not having to care about the water I'm drinking (one can't even trust mineral water bottles, since some of then are fake...). It's being a great experience, but sometimes we both simply get out of our nerves... i.g. when we arrived in Chitwan and more than 20 people working for different hotels started pushing us and barely forcing us to choose "their" hotel. Or with the fact that sometimes we have to walk in the sun with a heavy backpack because we can't find any taxi driver who doesn't try to impinge us an extremely expensive price...


In resume: we are both happy we already did the half of the journey. We know we will miss the liberty of traveling, but who knows how happy we will be the moment we arrive back home and see you guys again ;)

Update:

Pokhara was without a doubt one of the highlights of the trip.


We found ourselves in the coute d'azur of Nepal (the lake replaces the sea of course). There are great restaurants everywhere ( the "Corden Bleau" is extremely good).


We just took this opportunity to relax, so we did everything nice you can do in Pokhara. We did a boat tour in the lake with a nice couple from Portugal we found walking in the street, we had a massage, we had dinner close to the lake in candle light and, finally, we rented a motorbike and had a look around during the last day and went to the Batcave to see bats.

Our Kathmandu days

Well, we are still in Kathmandu. What can we say about this city? It's very different from what both of us expected. Much different. Different than India also, specially in some special, delicate points...


Despite of the fact that Nepal is a much poorer country than India, one actually doesn't feel this poverty when wandering around the streets of Kathmandu. The city is much cleaner and much well organized than all the Indian cities we saw (except maybe Gangtok, but Gangtok wasn't the "real" India), there are plenty of wonderful stores everywhere, selling everything you can desire (well, everything I can desire), from colorful clothes to tapestry and decoration, everything hand made and actually a bit pricey if you compared to India (but mainly of better quality also). In some points, this reminds me of Rome, specially because here you see a lot of temples, old buildings, beautiful historic spots everywhere, everything so nice and breathtaking. On the other hand, polution is a serious problem, so that a lot of people wear masks while walking on the streets. There is no pedestrian zone (specialy in Thamel, the main tourist zone) and one has to be really careful for not to die... there are no beggers around here (or actually just a few), but streets are really loud and taxis are everywhere, always asking you if you need a ride, or sometimes even following you for some metres (car taxis as well as bike rickshaws).


Nights in Kathmandu are dead (everything closes around 10pm) and there are no street lights, electricity fails and restaurants are very good but very expensive (we paid more than 1000 rupees yesterday for 2 pizzas & water/ice tea), and even for crossing the famous Durban Square (city center) you have to pay 300 rupees/person! But I think it would be very nice to spend more time here, since despite of all this, Kathmandu is a very pleasant city.


In our first evening, we met a Brazilian couple and we got along very well together. Yesterday we went together to the impressive buddhist monkey temple, one of the best things to do around here... it was a wonderful afternoon and we wanted to extend time together by joining them to a safari in the Chitwan National Park , but... we forgot we needed a stamp in our pass from the Indian embassy in order to go back there after Nepal! This was so frustrating!!! We were already packing and already had plans to take the bus to Chitwan in the morning when we realized that! So stupid!!! :(


So now we are stuck in Kathmandu, while our friends already left for Chitwan this morning and might be bathing with elefants by now. Plus: getting the fucking stamp from the Indian Embassy showed to be a much more difficult task than we ever imagined. We stayed in the Embassy (full of loud Spaniards trying to pass in front of everyone!!! Grrr... always the Spanish people!) the whole morning and had to pay a fee from 1400 rupees, differently from what the Embassy in Brussels told us (since we already have a multiple entry visa and we already had to pay more than 100 Euro/each for that). They told us to leave our passports there and come back at 5:30pm pick them up, so we are waiting now, and hoping they will not come up with another secret extra fee afterwards...


But anyway, here we had to learn an important lesson in the first place: when authorities say you have to pay, you just do it and never complain! :( Like when, crossing the Nepalese border, policemen told us to pay a fee of 100 rupee and never gave us a recipe. What else can you do? Shut your mouth and move. And when you say you have no money, they just make a rispid movement with their hands and say "so go!". And that's it.

Long way to Nepal

Yeah, we finally did it! We realized we were only trying to postpone the decision because of all the comments of other travelers about how hard it is to get here. But we did the bus trip from India to Kathmandu. And we survived!

Joao: it was a long night, because I couldn't sleep. The road was bad at some points, the music was on and loud the whole night.

Gabi: zzzzzzz!Slept like an angel.