India to like or, not to like!
Talk about a bombardment of the senses! I have no idea whether I like India or not! It’s psychotic, absolutely bonkers. The best way I can sum it up at the moment is that it’s a beautiful dump! I mean that as nicely as possible. There is so much going on that it’s impossible not to love it and saying the place has character is an understatement. Driving or walking along the streets means smelling the most awesome things, to smelling the most rotten things all within a few meters. And calling it a dump is kind of correct as there is rubbish everywhere and guys are peeing on the side of the street everywhere. So you see, full of character but a bit dirty.
So we did an elephant safari before heading out of the fantastic Nepal and into the madhouse of India. Indians don’t rush with anything, especially bureaucracy and anything involving paperwork takes a while, and so the border crossing took plenty of time. The highlight at the border was a tractor driver hitting our truck with his trailer, it did no damage to our reinforced beast but the tractor driver got pulled up by the cops and fined!
We spent two good days on the road heading to Varanasi so there isn’t much to report but hopefully the pictures and video will show what we saw. Cows everywhere for starters! It has to be said though that the food is absolutely fantastic, so much of it as well! I’m not a massive lover of Indian food but over here it is somewhat tastier, how long I will continue saying that I can’t say!
Today (Saturday) we were up at 5am for a boat trip along the Ganges which was obviously crazy as well. The day was largely spent out and about the city on auto rickshaws which was fantastic fun. On one of our first outings the rickshaw broke down but got speedily repaired with us still in it and then about 10 minutes later the guy got pulled over by the cops and from what I can gather he had to bribe the cop to let him go. All in all though it was nice to get out and about in the city and really experience the place.
I certainly don’t think this will be a place I end up hating, far from it. But most definitely a place that will be summed up by the word ‘experience’!
Trig Tales 