Home Again

After far too many hours on airplanes and sitting in airports, we are home again - minus one piece of luggage that I hope will follow soon! Our trip to India was wonderful beyond expectations and I plan to update the photos on the blog as I edit them. I had planned to do at least one more blog from India but evidently got too lax with eating street food and spent the last day in the bathroom! We ate everything, including fresh fruits and vegetables and salads, for the five weeks in India and didn't have a sick day until the day before we were to leave. I took the appropriate medicines and had mostly recovered by the time of our 16 hour flight from Mumbai to New York. We're still a little disorganized and confused about the hour and day, but everything at home was fine and all of my hard drives with all of the photos survived the trip. The five weeks were a fantastic experience but it's good to be home, in spite of 21 degree temperatures this morning! It was 95 degrees in Mumbai when we left. Please check back for more photos of Incredible India.

Wild India

We have been totally out of communication for over a week while we traveled in a part of India with more wildlife than people! We toured the Kerala Backwaters and the Periyar Wildlife Refuge in everything from a canoe to a riceboat converted into a houseboat to a tour boat full of newlywed Indian couples. It's been an interesting diversion. I tried (and failed miserably) to be Doug Herr and get some great bird photos. I will probably end up deleting 90% of the attempts, but if I find anything in focus, I'll try to post some photos later.

This area of India - the climate, vegetation, and even the laid-back attitude of the people - reminds me more of parts of Central America than anything we've seen in Northern India. It makes me homesick for Honduras and Guatemala. In fact, I automatically started thinking and speaking Spanish, which caused some confusion!

We just checked into the hotel in Mumbai and I have a couple of problems I hope somebody can help solve. My intrepid M8 locked up this morning while I was shooting photos from the boat (no, I didn't drop it in the water!). Instead of going snkclk when I pressed the shutter, it just went snk and Shutter Fault showed up on the screen. It looks like the top shutter blade is stuck slightly behind the second one. Can I just flip it back over the second blade and solve the problem? Help!

Also, it seems that any e-mail I received in the last week and a half has disappeared into the ethernet somewhere. And I'm not sure any I sent from Udaipur were actually sent. If you have sent or expected an e-mail from me, please let me know.

The hotel here has free wireless internet hook-ups! Yeah! I'll post more photos as soon as I unpack and download.

Rural India

Our favorite areas of India, as with most countries we have visited, have been away from the big cities out in the rural villages. We made friends with an auto-rickshaw driver in Varanasi and he took us an hour out of town to visit his family’s village. Sanjay Singh told us to be prepared to see very poor people in his village of Mahadepur. It’s true that they don’t have many material possessions, but the people seem happier and healthier than those we have met in the cities.



The village is neat and clean and very orderly divided into three castes. Each caste has their own well and own temple.






Everyone works in agriculture with the higher caste owning the land and providing the leadership for the community, the middle caste working as merchants and artisans, and the lower caste working as laborers.



Cows are the most important farm animals and are raised for their milk and manure. The women mix fresh cow manure with straw and make it into patties to dry for fuel. Once the patties are dry, they are stacked into decorative piles and covered with straw.





As everywhere else in India, the faces of rural India are beautiful.











And village life seems quieter and more peaceful than city life.






We spent all day yesterday flying south and are now in Kochin. There is a strike against a price increase in gasoline and no cars, buses, ferries, or auto rickshaws are running so we spent the day walking. It was almost as quiet as the countryside! Tomorrow we leave to stay on a lake in Kerala. It's very, very hot and humid here. Quite a change from northern India!

Life By the Side of the Road

Rajasthan

We have been traveling around Rajasthan for the past week and really having a great time. Tonight is the first time I’ve had a wireless connection since the last post and it’s costing me $6 an hour!! I had assumed that I would find free wireless connections in the hotels in India since we had free wireless almost everywhere in China, but it’s certainly not available here.

Rajasthan is referred to in all of the guide books as the most colorful area of India. Most of the traditional costumes, dances, and music are presented in “cultural events” for the tour groups in the big hotels.

I prefer the color seen by the side of the road. A lot of life in India is lived out in the open on the side of busy highways and rural roads. I’ve been trying to capture some of the daily life as we zoom past in traffic.

I don’t know when I’ll get an internet connection again, but I’ll keep posting when I can.

Agra

This morning we left the hotel before dawn to get a photo of the Taj Mahal at sunrise. We went across the river for the best view and had been told that the Taj would be at a distance so I took my long lenses for the Canon 5D. We had to wait for the gatekeeper to arrive to unlock the gates to a garden and as we walked through the garden, I looked to the right and saw this:



That’s with the Leica M8 and 35/1.4. Unfortunately, the “fog” didn’t lift all day so the sunrise and sunset and middle of the day photos are equally hazy. The guides insist that this is not pollution, it’s fog. They say there is no pollution in Agra, but the news reports say otherwise. The marble of the Taj Mahal is being eroded by the sulfuric acid in the fog. This fog burns your eyes and your throat. The air in Agra is polluted from factories using coke and the river is so polluted with sewage and runoff from the factories that it no longer sustains life. The government has banned all transportation except battery operated buses a few blocks from the Taj, but I’m afraid that’s too little and too late to make any real difference. It’s very depressing and I didn’t feel like walking around to get street photos in all of the haze.





Agra Fort

Tomorrow we leave for Jaipur in Rajasthan, hopefully leaving the fog behind.

Khajuraho

We left Khajuraho today and headed for Agra. After three and a half hours squeezed into a tiny car, we arrived in Jhansi to catch the train for Agra. I had hoped to take photos from the train but you couldn’t even see out of the windows and there was no platform between cars. I am amazed at the variety of transportation in India – two-wheeled, three-wheeled, and four legged – and the amount that they are all able to carry!

A school bus:


A busy street in Varanasi:


A local tuk-tuk on the highway:


I shouldn’t complain about a tiny car for the two of us and our luggage! It’s been a long day and we are up at sunrise tomorrow for the Taj Mahal so I’ll try to get caught up with blogging later. We’re still having a great time!!

Varanasi

Saturday, February 2

Oh, the places we have been and the things we have seen! Unfortunately, I cannot post photos on the blog. An undersea cable snapped in the Mediterranean and internet access has slowed to a crawl in all of India. It should be fixed by next week and I hope to be able to post more photos then. In the meantime, I have to find time to do some serious editing! I have taken over 6,000 digital photos in a week and half. At this rate I will run out of external hard drives pretty soon! There are just too many things to see and I am always saying, Oh, look at that! Which usually means I take a photo. Some of them are from moving, bouncing rickshaws so I am sure I will delete quite a few if I can just find time to do it. The apostrophe and quotation marks do not work on this computer so it is awkward to write anything.

We leave Varanasi, the oldest established city in the world, today for Khajuraho. Search Google to find out what it is famous for :-)

I hope to have internet access in Agra in a few days and will try to post some photos then. India is incredible!