Khajuraho

(PICTURE: Huyen in front of a temple.)

I've been getting a lot of slack from people for my lack of blogging. And well, I deserve it. I'm gonna try and get back on pace and finish up the India blogs and then put a nice pink bow around Ahoy Hanoi. After that, you can all get your daily fix from the blog Huyen is going to start up.

I think the lack of blogging has been twofold: 1. I'm home now and spending a lot of time with family and friends. 2. I'm honestly just not that excited to write about India. Sometimes trips take a little while to digest and process (the opposite of Indian food) and this was one of them. So, I'm gonna attempt to breeze through India with some more general blog posts.

After going to Varanasi, we headed to Khajuraho. Getting there, as always, was an adventure. We had to take a long train, stay overnight in a very sketchy town where everyone and their mother offered to drive us to Khajuraho for about 10x's the bus fare, and then take an early morning direct bus which stopped 3,974 times including an hour along a mountain pass which wasn't wide enough for two buses/trucks to go through.

We finally got to Khajuraho which was the HOTTEST place we visited in India. I mean, it was freaking HOT! It was the off season and we had the pick of whichever hotel we wanted. We had a bicycle cyclo guy drive us from place to place to get different rates. We finally ended up going to the one we thought we'd go to since it had free yoga in the morning. It wasn't the nicest place but for $4 a night you can't really complain.

The next day we rented bicycles and rode around all of the temples with the famous karma sutra carvings:

Looking at the carvings one can't help but be impressed. I mean, how flexible are Indians?

Seriously though, doesn't this explain why the population is the fastest growing in the world?

Photos of People

(PICTURE: One of my favorite shots I took in India.)

In Varanasi, I took a lot of interesting photos of people. Here's some of my favorites that I haven't posted on other entries:

Sleeping On Roofs

Everywhere we went, people would sleep on roofs at night. In Varanasi though, we definitely saw the largest clusters of people sleeping together on the roofs:


(PICTURE: Natural AC.)

The only problem with sleeping on a roof is that it exposes you to the elements. You know, like rain or monkeys. Yes, monkeys. In Agra, we saw a family sleeping on a roof. About two minutes after I took this picture...


...a monkey came along and scratched the shirtless boy:



The father wasn't too happy and threw a rock at the monkey:

Sunrise Over The Ganges

(PICTURE: Sunrise over the Ganges.)

We had actually booked our guest house because it said online that they had a free boat cruise at sunset every morning. Naturally this turned out not to be true. However, we agreed to pay the money and were told to be ready at 5AM the next morning. We were up at 5AM but nobody came to pick us up. Finally I managed to wake up the guest house owner who had booked the trip for us and he took us down to the ghats where we met the guys who supposedly were supposed to pick us up at 5AM. Anyway, we got down to the river just as the sun was peaking up over the horizon.



It was absolutely beautiful and amazing to see how much activity goes on around the river every morning.

Washing Clothes

(PICTURE: Getting some stains out.)

Huyen and I had our clothes washed in Varanasi. That was before we found out where most people wash their clothes:

(PICTURE: Men doing the laundry.)

Luckily we were told that our laundry was washed in a machine. However, the place air dried our clothes in the kitchen which meant they came back smelling like curry.

The Ganges

(PICTURE: A man praying in the Ganges.)

From Lonely Planet: The River Ganges provides millions of Indians with an important link to their spirituality. Every day about 60,000 people go down to the Varanasi ghats to take a holy dip along a 7km stretch of the river. Along this same area, 30 large sewers are continuously discharging into the river.

The Ganges River is so heavily polluted at Varanasi that the water is septic - no dissolved oxygen exists. The statistics get worse. Samples from the river show the water has 1.5 million faecal coliform bacteria per 100mL of water. In water that is safe for bathing this figure should be less than 500!

Huyen and I saw people drinking from the Ganges. DRINKING! I mean it's one thing to bathe in shit but to drink it. Ohhhhh man...

(PICTURE: A swim class. Notice the instructor has a tube for himself.)

(PICTURE: People taking a morning bath.)

(PICTURE: A happy bather.)

Cricket

Indians love their cricket. Seemingly every open space we saw around the country was occupied by kids playing cricket, also known as "the sport I know next to nothing about." Here's some pictures from Varanasi of kids playing next to a ghat:

(PICTURE: Huyen was the umpire.)


(PICTURE: Swing and a miss...like me in baseball.)