Jaislemar-
Immediately after our 11 hour train ride we put our luggage in our tents and went for a camel ride in the Rhajastani desert. We just barely made it there in time for the sunset, but it’s lucky that we did because watching the sun set on the sand dunes while riding brightly adorned camels with 13 of my best friends was the perfect way to kick off the trip. We reached the top of the dunes and then were shown a traditional Rajasthani folk dance by some locals (for money of course) and then we messed around until it got too dark to stay. Mostly we creatively rolled down the dunes and buried each other in the sand. It’s a shame that we did not have our cameras with us at this time because we found some very hilarious ways to roll down the dunes. When we got back to the “hotel “there was a girl performing Rajasthani dance for us. Since coming to India I have realized that I cannot dance at all. It is kind of like a joke for the rest of the world that Americans cannot dance. Until coming here and living around South Americans and Europeans I had zero idea how far behind I and most Americans were. I have made it my goal to be a good representation for my country and to return as one of the few Americans that are able to dance. So now I never miss an opportunity to learn new dance moves. I asked the Rajasthani girl to teach me dance but it failed miserably. My body is incapable of moving to the same rhythm at the same time as everyone else in this world. I have done enough garbha in my time here that I can do it fairly well, but my friends laugh at me because even though I do the dance correctly I appear like I am dancing to my own song because I am not moving at the same time as everyone else. I guess it’s the story of my life. I am incapable of doing anything in the same way as others. Why would dancing be any different. It’s not like this discourages me in any way from trying, because dancing is just too much fun to not do, but we can’t all be good at everything so it’s okay.
Rhajastani dancer
Jaislemar is sometimes referred to as "The Golden City".
Jodhpur-
Jodhpur is famous for being home to the “Blue City”. However only the old city is still painted blue. In ancient times blue house was code for the residence of a High-Brahmin priest. In times of war the enemy would avoid attacking the blue houses, because even in times of war no one would attack a holy man. Later the locals found that the indigo in the paint acted as an insect repellant and then everyone began to paint their house blue. We were only here for one day so apart from this we also saw a beautiful fort and then we did some shopping.
Sorry, but I don't have a better picture of the blue city on my computer at the moment.
Jaipur-
It was a long drive from Jodhpur to Jaipur so we arrived late at night. We checked into the hotel and then walked around the markets for a while. The next day we went sight-seeing all day. I will not write about all of it because it is a little boring so I will just put pictures.
Byron charming snakes.
Astrology Tower
Agra-
It would be an embarrassment to leave India without seeing the Taj Mahal! I hate feeling like a tourist in India, but for this I made an exception. I thought that I would be disappointed by the Taj Mahal because it is such an over-used icon. I thought it would be just like looking at a picture, but it wasn’t at all. I was impressed by how beautiful it was. In pictures the Taj Mahal looks pure white and flat, but it is actually a beautiful crème color and there is not an inch of marble without intricate carvings from the Koran or flowers. It was strategically built on the bend of a river so in the morning there is a mystical abyss surrounding the palace. It makes it even more beautiful that the palace was a monument to how much the king loved his wife. The lesser known story is that this king actually had three wives. The palace was built for his wife that he had 14 children with, and in commemoration of his other two wives he built two gates at the entrance of the Taj Mahal. That is a serious burn to his other wives. The king also planned to build an identical black Taj Mahal, but when his son heard about this he took his father prisoner. He did not want his father to spend so much of his future money. The king spent his last eight years held captive in the Agra Fort in one room that overlooked the Taj Mahal. It deserves its place as one of the Seven Wonders of the World. If you come to India (which I hope you all do) this is not something to pass up.
Characteristic detail work of the Taj Mahal.
Awesome reflection pool picture by Anna Kramer.
Camille and I
New Delhi-
The capital of India. We visited all of the famous monuments: the Lotus Temple, Swaminara, the Red Fort, Qutab Minar and India Gate. Most importantly we were reunited with a fellow exchange student. Her name is Maude from Canada. She is alone in her district so she traveled with us for our South Tour. Because of knee problems she was not able to join us on our North Tour. Our group is very close and it is horrible to be missing a member from our group on such an important tour, especially because our time together is so short. It was so great to see her again! I do not understand how she is so successful in her city. I thought that I had big problems in Surat with men acting inappropriately towards me, but Delhi is immensely worse. While walking down the street a girl in our group was causally grabbed even though she was in the company of two male exchange students! Everywhere I go I am stared at, but in Surat 70% of the stares are genuine curiosity. In Delhi 90% of the stares are threatening. I felt shameful to be a woman in this city. I felt objectified and extremely uncomfortable. I bitterly hate this city and I will never return to New Delhi.
Minali-
Minali is a village located about three hours up the Himalayan Mountains in the state of Himachal Pradesh. We spent four days here and I am completely enchanted by this village and its people. Many Tibetan and Nepalese refugees flee from their countries to Minali and therefore there is a very strong Buddhist influence. Minali does not feel like India at all. It felt like I was exploring a whole new country and it was exhilarating.
Day 1-
It took us 16.5 hours to drive to Minali. We left New Delhi at 6:30 at night and arrived in Minali at 1:00pm the next day. Our lunch was not included in our hotel package and since we were all very hungry from the long journey we ventured outside to find some good local food. Because of past issues with negative blog posts about India I have tried to keep my mouth shut about how badly dogs are treated in India, so I never told you how strongly it hurts me to live in a society where dogs are treated worse than trash, but with two and a half months left no one will send me back now. There are almost as many stray dogs as homeless people and they are equally unhealthy. I have seen countless bloated decaying canines mangled and thrown into trash piles. I have seen crows picking the eyes out of 2 month old puppies and dogs with strange skin diseases causing the skin to separate from flesh. It makes me cry that every time I come into contact with a dog they cower in fear and start shaking. No dog should be afraid of humans. Dogs have a very special place in my heart as I am an animal rights activist and very adamant vegetarian. I am sickened by the way a dog’s life is in India. This alone made my adjustment to India at the beginning “not easy”. I was very bitter for a long time against India for its non-chalet attitude towards animal cruelty. It is still a very weak point for me. When I think about the dogs in India it makes me very angry but I understand to the smallest degree why things are this way. India is still a third world county and there are millions of people whom still struggle to simply survive. I understand that logically people’s livelihood should be above that of a dog’s. This absolutely does not at all justify the abuse of dogs, but I understand why dog abuse is at the bottom of Indian people’s priorities. I know this is negative and will offend any Indian who will read it, but it is not wrong to point out the flaws in something. This is how change happens. My country also has many flaws, and I will be the first one to point them out to you. Despite U.S.A’s flaws I am very proud to be an U.S. American and I could never live in another country. I want to very clearly say that I do NOT hate India. Anyways…..now that you have that background information, the dogs in Minali were 100% different. All of them were still strays, but they were treated like town pets. It really warmed my heart to see dogs with life in their eyes. I did not realize until I saw these dogs again how much anger I have because of the treatment of dogs. Being around these dogs made me unspeakably happy. They were playful and healthy and so much fun! We played fetch with snowballs, I wrestled with puppies and one dog even climbed to the top of a mountain with us. After seeing these dogs it made it a bit difficult to return to Surat and it also brought back memories of my puppies which is tough.
On this first day we just meandered our way through the city and played with a lot of dogs. We also discovered a Himalayan delicacy called momos. Momos are a Buddhist food very similar to a dumpling. Momos gave us a break from eating Indian food every day and they are the perfect food to eat during the winter. Did I mention that there is still a good foot and a half of snow in Minali? The cold there was another reminder of home which could in part explain why I was so comfortable there.
Day 2-
We made an organized trip through the city to visit all of the Buddhist temples and ate a lot more momos! It was a leisurely day, but the city is stunning! It is surrounded by snow-capped mountain peaks at every side.
Day 3-
In the morning we wandered around the town and did some shopping. After, we searched for a place where we could eat momos for lunch. It was a Buddhist festival day so most of the restaurants were closed. After a while of walking we found a little lonely restaurant in the Old Minali. He said that he was about to close his restaurant, but that he would serve us chai. However we did not want chai, we wanted momos. He then suggested that there was another town two miles away that might be open to serve lunch. The only problem was that we had to hike through the mountains for two miles to get there. At the time it felt like a good idea. There was a good reason that all the trekking trips in Minali were canceled. The snow was very deep and was starting to turn into slush. We were not walking up a designated path either. We were just walking up a random side of the mountain. None of us were wearing appropriate clothes or shoes to hike up the Himalayan Mountains. It was also not what I would call easy climbing. After about 3 miles with no town in sight we started to get skeptical about how close the town was. The snow was also starting to get above our waist. I stepped in some very deep snow and as I pulled my right foot out I twisted my ankle. Yup. I twisted my ankle 3 miles up the Himalayas. After this we decided it was probably a good time to turn back the way we came. I basically had to fall my way down the mountain while trying to keep steady on the arm of a fellow exchange student who was a certified life guard. Random fact for you: life guarding training does not prepare one to help victims of twisted ankles in the Himalayan Mountains. I felt like such an idiot for hurting my ankle 3 miles up in the Himalayas (not that it was on purpose). I got through it by thinking, “This will be a good story someday!”. So I hope you all enjoyed my idiocy and pain. To make it better we went back to the restaurant where we had originally asked for momos, and somehow the restaurant was not closed and magically had momos and chai! FML. When we returned to our hotel that night we read in the Lonely Planet that in Minali one should never trust the directions of the locals because they are a very bad judge of distance. In the last five years (or something close to that) 18 foreigners have disappeared in the mountains and their bodies were never recovered. We were not in any real danger, but who knows! Maybe if I didn’t twist my ankle we would have gone a lot farther until it was too late to turn back and we were lost. That is a very big “What if” but it is scary to think about. So after my momo therapy we walked back into town and caught a rickshaw to a natural hot springs. After a day of wet feet and snowy mountains a hot springs sounded like a fantastic idea. However, between our cold-bitten feet and the steaming hot springs it was much too hot to swim in. I could only dunk my feet in for a maximum of 13 seconds, and that was with clenching my teeth. Only one of us was brave/stupid enough to even attempt to immerse themselves in the springs, and of course it was a fellow American. He looked at the camera and said “My name is Byron Long from Jack Ass and this is Hot Springs!”. He took one step into the pool and cringed, but then he slipped and except for his face he was completely covered by the water. He screamed in a very high octave and then scrambled as fast as he could back to the stairs to get out. My gosh, the video is priceless! Intelligent or not, I give him all of my respect. He claims that the water singed some hair off. There was definitely some hair missing, but I am not sure if scolding water can do that. I do think that the water was hot enough to easily poach an egg. I think I believe him. To try to normalize our body temperatures again we drank some chai at a local restaurant and waited for a bus. Since Minali attracts many tourists there was a western bakery there, and I had a chocolate donut! I never thought a donut could make me so happy. I do not even like donuts, but western food is really exciting to me now. I really like Indian food a lot, but since I eat it every day it is nice to change.
Day 4-
Between the third night and the fourth morning everyone except me managed to get at least slightly sick. Many blamed the momos, which it could not be for two reasons. 1- Momos are too delicious to ever do anyone any harm. 2- I ate more momos than anyone else and I was completely fine. I was really surprised that I wasn’t sick because I fall sick very fast in India. Maybe now after being sick so many times my immune system is like a warrior. I have had food poisoning many times in India and now my body is able to recognize when food is not okay fast. My body does not waste time trying to digest my food it just rejects anything at all questionable. I do not enjoy this sensation, but it is much better than being off my feet for a couple of days. So for this day there were only 6 out of the 14 who were willing to go out and explore that day. Manjeet (our tour guide) took us to a friend’s ski resort. Even though there is a ski resort in my region of USA I have never actually tried skiing before. The Himalayas did not feel like a good place to start learning because I know skiing is difficult, and that in all likelihood I would not be able to move on my skis. Instead of skiing I saw a giant bouncy ball that I could be pushed down the mountain in. Why would I ski down the Himalayan Mountains when I could be pushed down them in a giant bouncy ball? When you put it like this skiing sounds boring. Many people can say that they have skied down the Himalayas, but I am one of the elite few who can say that they rolled down the Himalayas two times in a giant bouncy ball! I also went paragliding. The view was beyond surreal. These two things did not take up much time so I had some extra time to build a snowman for my Brazilian friend who has never seen snow before. It did not have gloves or lot of time so the snowman was small, but since it is her first and only snow for a long time I tried my best to give her a good example. By the end of our ski trip everyone was sick except for me so that was pretty much the end of our adventure for this day. This was our last day in Minali so we had to get everything that night. Anna was okay enough to go with me to the city of Minali twenty minutes away to shop for all of the people who were sick. Minali had these incredibly colorful ethnic hand-knitted wool socks that a lot of us brought back for presents. Anna and I bought a lot of those to distribute among the exchange students. We also bought Tibetan Prayer flags and seven kgs. of fruit. We have a tradition of instead of stopping to eat, we just buy pounds and pounds of fruit to eat on the bus. This is one of the things I will miss dearly from India. In USA fruit is very expensive and there is not a fruitwala at every corner selling a kg. of deliciously fresh and exotic fruit for $0.75. Sometimes I just eat bag-fulls of fruit when I am hungry.
Day 5-
We woke up at 5:00am to make an extra stop to Daramshala(the home of the Dali Lama and the Tibetan resistance against China). This was not in our itinerary but it would be a shame to be within six hours of it and not to visit it. It was a long winding drive through the mountains to get there, but I am glad to have seen it. I can’t say that I am impressed by the city, but it was interesting to see... The Dali Lama and the Pope are the two highest holy figures of the world, but Dharanmshala was a scene hang out for stoner hippies. I can’t deny that I am a bit of a hippy myself. I am in India for a year, I was a vegan and I go to extreme lengths to protect nature, but hippies have ruined Dharamshala. There was marijuana and hookas everywhere. There were more weirdo western hippie fusion restaurants than Tibetan or Indian restaurants. Everyone had dreadlocks and dressed like they were homeless. I have no idea where I was. It was not India at all. It was like someone set up an amusement park of what they thought India was. The Dali Lama’s temple was equally confusing. I do not have any exposure to Buddhism so of course the temple would appear strange to me, but it was too strange. I can’t tell you why because I also do not know. I have no idea what I saw in this city. I was very aware of the Tibetan Chinese conflict before I came. I did my best to avoid buying Chinese products and so on. I did not learn any more about the cause than before, and I am no more inspired. I think I just walked around the city in a daze. Maybe there was too much smoke in the air from the stoner foreigners. I don’t know. One thing I learned from the city is that I have a no respect for hippie culture. I will never again identify myself as a hippie. Hippies are just people whom complain about the government and “fight” for non-existent causes by getting stoned. They are completely blind to their actions and ruin every culture they are a part of including USA. I am still very confused by what I saw in Daramshala, but like I said it was very interesting to see.
Chandagar, Punjab-
Driving from Daramshala to Punjab was another eight hour drive. Our tour guide brought us here to attend a wedding of one her friends. We were supposed to stay at a hotel that the bride’s family owned, but for some reason that did not work out. So after two nights of sleep on the bus, we had to sleep on the bus again, but at least they gave us strange-smelling comforters to sleep with. Somehow there was room for the boys to sleep in the hotel, so it was just the girls who had to sleep on the bus. It was a very short night though because we had to wake up at 7:00 for the wedding day breakfast. After our breakfast we were taken to an Osho ashram where we were to spend that night. For anyone who knows who this guy is I am sure you are laughing right now after my hippie comment earlier. Speaking of not respecting hippie culture Osho is the father of the modern hippie religion. It was a very interesting place to spend a night. The basis of this “religion” is nothing is bad, and one should do what the heart wants because that is the wisdom of the true inner self and guide to the right path. On a basic level this works. I agree with this idea, BUT as the ideology continues it gets screwed up. The problem is not the ideal ology but the people who are attracted to this “religion”. Osho’s “wisdom” can be interpreted in twisted ways. Nothing weird happed except for at 4:00am we all woke up to a bunch of synchronized screaming coming from the meditation room. Actually for India this is not that strange. It was a cool place to stay. At the wedding we learned a ridiculous shoulder dance that Punjab is famous for, and Anna Camille and I performed an impromptu Bollywood dance number for the wedding crowd. Other than this the wedding was uneventful. The city of Chandigarh was planned by a famous French architect, and it is famous for being one of the few planned cities of India. It was strange to walk the streets of Chandnagar because it felt a lot like walking the streets of a western country. The streets were paved with clean sidewalks, beautiful GREEN parks, and chain stores. Between Manali, Daramshala and Chandnagar I felt like I was out of India.
Train-
Just like that it is back to Surat. This was our last real time together with the exchange students. I have talked about this before, but I will never again have friends like this. We are all exceptional people and I have grown just as much from knowing them as being in India. The next time we see each other it will be at our Bon Voyage party in April. It is horribly sad to think about leaving everyone, but I know life has to move on. We are all invited to each other’s weddings in the future, but who knows where we will be in that time. I think some of us will end up doing some very crazy things with our lives. I am strangely eager for life to move on. This year was the most important year of my life, but I am very excited to go back home and see how I have grown and continue my life. I realize I am not going home for a while, but I am far past the middle of my exchange and now it really feels like the end.
