Adventure of the month

1. The walled city is a UNESCO world heritage site and justifiably so. It is one of those places that has, in an odd twist of fate, benefited from years of poverty. The historic fortifications and colonial architecture were never subjected to the whims of modernization and thus remain in much the same state as they were in 16th and 17th century. It is still possible to walk along the walls and ramparts admiring, to one side, the Caribbean and to the other, the colorful historic town. When that gets old, one can visit museums dedicated to the gold or emerald trade, or less romantically, to the practices of the Inquisition. Or if museums are not to your liking, it is possible to simply stroll through the charming little lanes, knowing that in a town this small, the probability of getting lost (even for the directionally challenged, such as myself) is slim.

At this point, it has now taken me longer to blog about India than it did to actually plan and go on the trip itself. It would be nice to wax poetic about how this is due to the indescribable beauty and mystery we witnessed throughout our travels, but the truth lies closer to the facts that twelve cities= twelve blog posts and I am a procrastinator. Those immutable impediments aside, I have finally reached the end of the Indian adventure. On the same day that Laura and Lena were boarding flights home, I was hopping a train up to Amritsar, the holiest Sikh city in the northern region of Punjab. It was now late December and the temperature was dropping sharply, which combined with exhaustion from a pretty hectic schedule, had me sick and coughing like tuberculosic chain smoker. This was justifiably stressing the mother of the sweet, quiet boy who was seated next to me on the train for a five hour ride. I felt bad for them both every time she came over to the boy with a new batch of vit...

There is the old refrain “Leave the best for last” and then there is our approach to the city of Delhi which went more along the lines of “Put it off until you can’t put it off no more.” We heard and read so many discouraging things about this major city, from tourists and Indians alike, that we would have been perfectly content to skip it altogether. The problem was that when determining a route through India, we had to account for the fact that three travelers were coming from three different parts of the world (in our case, the US, Romania and the Ukraine) and had no choice but to meet there. This did not mean, however, that we had to stay there. I flew into Delhi direct from Chicago and after a brief eight hour stay in a hostel whose décor could best be described as “prison chic”, I met the girls at the domestic terminal where we immediately boarded a flight for Varanasi. Three weeks later, we had reached the point where we had been to nine cities in Northern India and our time...

I interrupt the India travelogue, which I regret is taking way too long to write, to post February's adventure of the month, lest anyone think I have spent the last two months doing nothing but dreaming of India.  Well, there has been some of the that, but there has also been some of this.... The scenario: Stuck in Halle, Germany, a town seriously challenging my belief that it is impossible to get bored in Europe with no work on the horizon for the next 24 hours and limited access to the internet. My only foreseeable options were to find a way out of Halle (pronounced “Hell”…I am certain of it) and save my sanity or to stay and perhaps take up knitting. Considering I hear carrying knitting needles through airport security is a bit of a bitch, I opted for a rental car.

This is the 10th post, so far, about our travels through India and frankly, I feel like I have run out of ways to describe forts, temples and cenotaphs. It is a short-coming on my part,to be sure, because for all their similarities, each one has something new and unique to offer, but my vocabulary for stone carvings, towering forts and vast views only goes so far. In search of inspiration, I went back and re-read my journal entries for our next destination, Udaipur. On day one, I wrote no fewer than four variations of "I think I am going to like this place".

What do you do when India's 2nd largest Jain temple stands between you and your next scheduled stop? Easy, you hire a car and break up your drive with the coolest rest stop ever. The massive temple located in Ranakpur, midway between Jodhpur and Udaipur, is built entirely of marble and boasts 1444 carved columns with no two alike (well, maybe a couple are alike but no two are identical). We were there when the doors opened to visitors and stayed for what felt like minutes, but was probably closer to hours. I walked around completely awestruck, marvelling at the workmanship and artistry of each column, trying in vain to absorb each and every detail. As with the temples at Khajuraho, it was incomprehensible to me that prior to my research on India, I was not familiar with this site. And it is wonder-of-the-world level amazing! Were the temple anywhere else, it would be a major star attraction, but my theory is that India possesses such an embarrassment of riches when it comes ...

A sleeper train with bunks stacked three high brought us to our eighth stop, Jodhpur. Known as the blue city, not for its love of emotion-filled guitar-heavy music or the residents' inordinate sadness, but for the indigo blue tint used to paint many of its buildings, it is one of those places where you just know you can not take a bad photograph. The tiny cow-clogged lanes look so artfully distressed that you could swear that a team of decorators had recently come through with the latest shabby chic manual in hand. Our hotel lay smack in the middle of all that blueness at the foot of the Mehrangarh Fort, so even our pre-dawn arrival was not enough to keep me still for more than an hour or two. As soon as the sun peaked over the horizon, Laura and I were making our steep ascent up the hill, trying to keep an accurate count of how many ancient gates we had passed through, lest we bypass the entrance to the fort itself. Apparently, we were approaching from the back side, leading eve...