India Part 1

So it has taken a while but here it is: my first post about my trip to India.

Don't know where to begin but I made a map over my trip which maybe was a little overambitious and I think that's as good of a start as any.

My companions for the trip was Per and Hallvard, both NTU exchange students from Swedish universities, although Hallvard is actually Norwegian. Here we are at a train museum in Mysore, from the left: Per, Hallvard and me.

We started out in New Delhi after having arrived by plane, was picked up at the airport and driven our hostel. There we set up in our room and then went down an had chat with the very friendly sikh-receptionist of the hostel, we told him of our initial travel plan and he told us that it was a really bad plan because some of the places were really boring this time of the year and very little of it would show us the "true India". We had also only booked one trip in advance so we needed to get train tickets and so on so we were shown to a travel agency (which was a bit scary since we've heard that there are a lot of bad travel agencies in Delhi). A new plan was made and we booked all our transportation and hotels for the first week through the travel agency, we might have paid a little too much but at least we didn't scammed!

In our new itinerary Delhi was more or less completely excluded, we only stayed in Delhi for the day; seeing the India gate and had dinner. In the new plan we had a driver for the first part of the trip, a nice guy named Sunil, it was he who took us to the restaurant but we told him afterwards that we had planned to eat a bit cheaper during the trip and he started taking us to some more fun and cheap places instead. Nevertheless the dinner was pretty good but it would also turn out that most food in India was this good, nom nom nom!

The day after we jumped in the car and did a 6 hour car ride to Jaipur, "the pink city". Our first day we spent visiting the burial place of the maharajah's family with its quite exquisite tombs and a big fort located just outside Jaipur.

You do get thirsty when walking in the sun all day.

We also stopped by "the sunken temple", for some reason a part of Jaipur was flooded and made a lake unfortunately putting a beautiful temple partially under water.

And before heading back into town we had an included elephant ride! 

In the evening Sunil joined us for dinner and he shared a whiskey bottle with us on the rooftop of the restaurant before we headed down for the actual dinner, which was delicious, as usual.

The day after we headed down to the palace and the palace area, the center of Jaipur. The palace was nice but not that special since the maharajah still lives in the palace and a big part of it is closed off. 

Below is the Hawa Mahal which was the living quarters of all the women in the court, it was built so that the women could look down on the life of city and the market outside.

Superbalance!

Later the same day we once again got into the car and we then drove for another six hours, destination: Ranthambore National Park. The first car ride wasn't that bad, you got a little shocked of the amount of cows around (and on the road) but the road itself was good. This ride went through much less populated areas and after first having two lanes, there was suddenly only and after a while it felt like there was no road at all and that we were driving on a field.

Anyway, eventually we got to Ranthambore and checked in to the hotel and went to bed early since we were going to leave for our safari early in the morning!

A modified truck/open bus was the vehicle of choice for the day.

Ranthambore is famous for its tigers, unfortunately for us the tigers were pretty shy and we didn't get to see any. We did however get to see a lot of other animals.

Boars.

Deer.

Alligator (alternatively a large crocodile). 

Crocodile.

And except a ton of monkeys and peacocks we also saw these weird animals which we believe to be subspecies of Homo sapiens sapiens, maybe more specifically Homo sapiens sapiens ingeniare.

From Ranthambore we did an even longer trip to get to Agra, home of the Taj Mahal. We went there in the morning, hoping to see the Taj Mahal in the sunrise but when we got there it looked more like this.

Even though the weather was a disappointment the Taj was really breathtaking with its amazing details at the same time as it's huge and over 300 years old.

A hint that I need to work on my Wushu stances...

All the details in wall are either carved in the stone or made by inlays of semi-precious stones (one reason why it still looks as good as it does). And if you think Per looks a little sick it's probably because he his and was getting worse as the day went along.

And of course you have to do some jumping in front of the Taj!

But Agra does not only have the Taj Mahal, there is also the great Agra fort

In the fort Per started feeling more and more sick so we left him to rest close to the entrance while I and Hallvard explored the fort. I will tell more about Per in the next part about my trip.

On the way to the train station and the train to Varanasi we stopped by the "Baby Taj" which is actually an older mausoleum but because it's smaller and don't have the same details as the real Taj most people call it the "Baby Taj".

Next stop: Varanasi. But for that you will have to wait for my next entry about my trip to India.