Mumbai to Omkareshwar

We arrived at Goa train station early and lay on the concrete staring at some leaking water and men trying to haul bags of rocks over the tracks for two and a half hours. From Goa to Mumbai we travelled first class. What is the difference between first and second class? An overzealous attendant barges in with a can of Glade and sprays the cabin and there is some first class sticky tape on the beds. We slept pretty well apart from an entire Indian family (in two beds) who came in at 1am and got off the train again at 3am.

The sun was not quite up when we reached Mumbai. We negotiated an overpriced taxi to the hotel – but he actually found the hotel, so we considered it money well spent. It was ‘impossible’ for us to check in before 12pm, so we walked around town trying to find a place for breakfast.

You’d imagine Mumbai to be one of those all night cities where you can get anything you want at any time. Well, not so. Mumbai does not wake up until 10am, so we did some incidental sightseeing while waiting for the breakfast shops to open.

We were staying in Colaba, in the southern part of Mumbai. Colaba is not far from the Taj hotel, the ‘Gateway to India’ and Leopold’s cafe, where the attacks in November last year were. On sunrise we strolled down to the waterfront of Mumbai harbour and saw the Taj hotel – an enormous colonial edifice with red domes on top, still being repaired at one end from the attacks. Looking out over the water was a large stone arch – the ‘gateway to India’ – reputedly the point where the British landed, and hundreds of years later, where the last official left. There is a wide boulevard in front of the Taj and behind the gateway where the hawkers were preparing for their day’s scamming and hundreds of pigeons were being fed by an old man. A circle of people were practising ‘laughing yoga’, where they all run towards each other laughing at nothing, or perhaps laughing at how silly they looked. I was laughing.

Eventually we had breakfast at a place called Cafe Monde, which had good coffee and we read the paper.

Lonely planet had a suggested walking tour of Mumbai, so we roughly followed its course after breakfast. The walk took us down MG road (every town and city has an MG road, and I have only now worked out that it is Mahatma Ghandi Road) past numerous dominating colonial buildings, Including the Police Headquarters (previously the yacht club), the high court, the museum, and Mumbai university. Some of the buildings were formerly white, but the pollution had taken to them and many parts were stained black. The high court and the university were side by side and very impressive. I know nothing about architecture, but they looked like gothic cathedrals. The man with a machine gun standing behind a bunker of sandbags said we could not go in. We didn’t try to bargain.

Mumbai, or Bombay as it was, (and lots of people still call it Bombay, to my surprise) is a very impressive display of British power, and perhaps that is how they meant it to be. Interestingly, I have heard that Bombay is just a British mispronunciation of Mumbai that caught on. Similarly the British couldn’t quite say Kolkata, and said Calcutta.

There were also some quite different buildings along the way including a baby blue synagogue with a ‘mobile combat team’ vehicle out the front and a massive art deco construction with two women holding longswords carved into the facades. The women must have been 100 feet.

This area of Mumbai is a living relic. Even the unmarked buildings are old British mansions stained from the pollution or crumbling with age. That said, this was clearly a wealthy area. The streets were wide and clean, traffic signals were obeyed, brand stores, ATM’s and coffee shops (with espresso coffee!) were numerous.
The walk also guided us around the central park of Mumbai. It is a huge rectangle, surrounded by markets. There are seven or eight cricket pitches there and the teams were warming up in their whites for Saturday matches. Heaps of kids were playing ad-hoc games with no pads and real cricket balls. We stopped for a while in the shade(away from the flying balls) and watched one old guy smash some boundaries off another old guy.

A few kilometres down a street of local markets (from which Kate bought a pair of denim shorts for Rs 100) was the Victoria Terminus, or the central railway station of Mumbai, where we had got off the train earlier. The building is famous for the attacks last year, and apparently there is a market in Mumbai for ‘terror tourism’ (although I don’t know how you could tell the difference considering most of the attacks were at the most popular tourist destinations), but it is a huge old stone building with a large, spiky, pollution stained dome. With the double –decker buses and yellow taxis whizzing past the roundabout – it is an impressive sight.

By then it was past check-in time so we walked back to the hotel and my secret santa acquired something on the way. On the way, we stopped at a patisserie that sold real croissants. It might not sound like much, but the sight of proper, soft, light, flaky, buttery croissants brought us unspeakable joy.

Our room was more like an apartment. People were living permanently in the surrounding rooms and we had a little balcony that looked over a garden. Not that it mattered, we were barely in the room for a waking hour. The hotel was in a nice area, with banyan trees shading the entire street. I think it was for this reason that all the taxi drivers hung out here.

An island of Mumbai, in the harbour, is the site of some very ancient caves. The island is reachable by boat, so after unpacking we returned to the harbour and paid for a ticket on the ‘deluxe boat’. Once on the ferry, there was additional tax to get onto the top floor of the boat, and I hereby stand as the only person in history who has fallen for that one. We didn’t even get a seat.

Mumbai harbour is very polluted. We ploughed through the soupy air and the slick water for about an hour, passing tankers and battleships and even the occasional surfacing submarine. As we stepped off the boat there was a small train that went only 100 metres along the flats to the base of a hill, where, if you were still feeling lazy, you could be carried on your very own chair by four men to the beginning of the caves. The caves were very old, some as old as 200BC. The first cave was impressive, it was a large hall with some elephants and an huge Shiva head, one of the biggest in India. These caves are monolithic, which means they cut the caves, and all the ornate carvings, from the mountainside with only a hammer and chisel. There were also a number of big lingums, but I will come back to Shiva and his lingums later.

We were both starving by the time we arrived back on land in Mumbai and went to dinner at a restaurant called Indigo. It was expensive, but I can truly say that I had the best burger of my life there. It exceeded even the glory of Ben Bry. It was simply a bun, a big piece of steak and some brie cheese, but as you bit through the bun, there was no resistance upon reaching the steak. In the restaurant, when you ordered a beer they showed it to you first, like it was a bottle of wine. Very posh. The restaurant also had salads and meats and desserts on display, exactly like a Sydney delicatessen. In the end we concluded that it would have been best not to visit Mumbai. The food was so good and we would be venturing back into the land of mixed vegetable curry and three chapattis.

We walked home through the night markets that sell 4-foot polka-dot balloons, gold monacles and telescopes, mens and women’s underwear, tourist t-shirts and multicoulred bangles. Secret Santa acquired another item on this walk.
Overnight there was a huge storm that woke me up.

Theoretically breakfast was included in our room price, but when we found out this consisted of one bread roll and a packet of Nescafe, we went back to Indigos for some porridge and coffee. We checked out at 12 and got ripped off again for a cab to our next hotel (we eventually realised you can get metered ones and they are the way to go), but there was extra pressure to just get inside something because a holy man was walking down our street, naked to the hip, cracking a whip at us and demanding money.

We met our leader for the next tour from Mumbai to Delhi. Mahindra is best descried as jolly. He’s a borderline alcoholic that laughs deeply, is a well of knowledge and specialises in gourmet trips (and looks the part). We are travelling with just one other person, a girl from England – Emma.

With the group, we returned to the Gateway of India and ate some raw onion, coriander and green mango on a crisp from the streetside. Seeing another bollywood movie was on the cards, but having already experienced (and barely understood) one in Jaipur, Kate and I opted to take a taxi to Asia’s biggest laundry. You might have seen it on that ‘History of India’ show. It was a 15 minute drive out of the plush, harbour side area of Mumbai into the poorer areas. The laundry is beside the train tracks and consists of thousands of sweaty, topless men bashing soapy clothes against some smoothed rocks. We decided to go inside and take a look (and got done by the ‘you need to pay us 100 Rs ($2.50) to get in’ scam – but what can you do, they are standing there, you want to go past...). We were guided by a young man who took us through all the pastel shirts and bedsheets. All the workers were more than happy to share their time with us, so it was a good experience. The OHS was questionable. Electrical wires connected to dryers just dangled on the soaking floor and we went into one room where some chemicals were bubbling under a 40 gallon drum, right beside where people were taking a rest.

We returned to the hotel via Chowpatty beach – Mumbai’s answer to Bondi. It was more like a mudflat and there were stockpiles of those jack-shaped concrete things to stop boats landing on the shore. Locals were snuggling each other on the sand and while vendors inquisitively strolled past selling fluro windmills. Kids were riding along the beach in these little multicoloured cars blaring hindi trance. The city is built right along the edge of this stretch of water, and we walked the 2-3km back to the hotel. We had a beer at a restaurant that smelt of urine and had red lights out the front.

For dinner we ate at a local restaurant and had some excellent Indian food. It was the first Indian in a week and tasted good.

The next morning was a 4:30am start, so we packed early and made our way to the Central Mumbai Railway Station for a train to Aurangabad. There is still the odd bullet hole visible in the walls.

Overall, we really enjoyed our time in Mumbai. We did not see the slums and much of the poverty (although they do run ‘tours’ of there, and people have mentioned how a significant number of people living there are white collar workers, how there is electricity, drinking water and most people rent, and how the annual turnover of trade in the slum is US$650 million a year – slightly less than the GDP of the Solomon Islands). We were both struck by how different Mumbai is, how diverse, multicultural and modern it is. It has to be said though, eating some of the finest food we have ever eaten certainly improved our perceptions.

I had a couple of cups of coffee for breakfast before the train left. We were sitting in an AC chair car, which for day trips, is fairly luxurious. A waiter comes around and asks for orders for breakfast and lunch. He had an astonishly clam and gentle demeanour. Payment was a relaxed ‘when you want affair’ and the carriage was full of young professionals, presumably going to work, as the men smelt heavily of cologne. I had two omelettes, the second of which I though the waiter was giving me because I looked hungry, but alas I had to pay. Lunch was vegetable biriyani, basically spicy fried rice.

We arrived in at Aurangabad at around 1:30pm. Aurangabad takes its name from the Mughal emperor, Aurangzeb, who ruled from here between 1653 to 1707. Aurangzeb is famous firstly for being the son of Shah Jehan who locked his father in the Red Fort in Agra in a chamber overlooking the Taj Mahal, which Jehan built. He is famous secondly for being a paranoid psychotic who had an incestuous relationship with his sister and oversaw the demise of Mughal rule in India.

Our first hotel room was fine except for the smell and the big hole near the roof of the bathroom through which workman only a few metres away could see. We changed rooms to one where the same hole was patched up.

After checking in we jumped back in the cab and took the ride out to the Ellora caves. The caves are 20km out of Aurangabad. Again, these were monolithic caves, so they were cut out of an existing mountain. Ellora’s caves are remarkable because three different religions plied their trade here – Buddhists, Hindus and Jains. The Buddhist caves were the oldest, but the Hindu caves were the more impressive. The main Hindu cave was constructed over 150 years, involving six generations of craftsmen and was dedicated to Shiva and his lingums.

Shiva is a multi-limbed, dope smoking, deamon smoting, destroyer god. As such there are many images carved into the caves of Shiva decapitating daemons with one hand, while fondling the breasts of his wife with another. The Shiva lingum, is basically a half-egg shaped stone that sticks out from the ground. Lingums represent the unity of the penis and the vagina and are believed to be imbued with considerable power (especially over fertility) if consecrated with the right prayers. Lingums are everywhere, often covered in garlands of flowers. Some lingums are huge and some are very small. People have lingums in their houses and restaurants.

The highlight, however, was when our guide chanted a Buddhist mantra in a cave with ribs cut into the roof to amplify the sound.

Kate was not feeling well that night, so we both had an early night.

The next morning we hired a car and driver to do some sightseeing. We drove out, back in the direction of the Ellora caves to Dalutabad. It had been raining quite steadily all morning and the hills and mountains were barely visible in the cloud. Thesemountains around Aurangabad are like readymade forts. They have sheer sides and flat tops. From there it is really just a case of add a wall and a citadel and presto, you have an impregnable fort. One such mountain in Dalutabad has been popular for fort-building for nearly 1000 years. Dalutabad fort was the first stop on our sightseeing tour.

Archaeologists are currently excavating a Medieval village on and around the mountain where Dalutabad fort now sits. Dalutabad really shot to fame, hoever, when another psychotic Mughal emperor, Tulaq, marched the entire population of Delhi 1100km to establish a new capital here. Most died upon the way, and those who didn’t made the return journey less than 12 months later.

Many years later a second Mugal emperor, Aurangzeb, also moved his capital here and the fort that stands atop the hill now is mostly his conception. Because this fort was built by a maniac, it is far more interesting. The red fort in Agra was like a well-proportioned body – large limbs for defence but an equally large brain, in the form of spaces for public gathering and politicking. Daultabad fort has massive limbs and no brain.

The outer walls remain and are spectacular among the overgrowth and moss. In the courtyards there is a beautiful orange Minar, (a large, thin mughal tower) second only to the Qutb Minar in Delhi. These outer areas at the foot of the mountain are open and peaceful with abundant gardens, temples and mosques. Move up the hill towards the citdel, however, and the paranoia grows. First, there are two steep moats with tiny drawbridges and two enormous brass-cast cannons. If you manage to get past here, you walk into a deep and winding cave cut into the mountain itself. It is called the ‘dark passage’, and inside there is no light but for carefully placed tunnels letting in just a glint of light. Enemy soldiers, in their claustrophobia and madnesss (apparently soldiers used to kill each other in the tunnel) would run towards these lights only to plummet into the moat below. Channels were also cut into the tunnel, so, unseen by enemy solders, boiling oil could be poured on them. The doors either side could be closed and if you did make it thorough, you would have to fight your way, single file, out of the doorway.
We needed a man with a flame torch to guide us through the tunnels, and if they weren’t claustrophobic enough, the smell of bat poo was almost overwhelming. Kate enlisted the guiding hand of a local woman to get through the passage.

The story goes that the fort has only been twice breached, and on both occasions the guards were bribed.

After the tunnel there is a very long set of stairs the curls around the mountain. I puffed up these and reached the summit. The views of the surrounding mountains and khaki forests were breaktaking, but the citadel was just a lonely hall and a massive cannon.

After the fort we visited another ‘Baby Taj’ – which was just that, a miniature, pollution stained and version of the Taj. Apparently the designer of this Tomb was more into finanacial austerity than the Shah Jehan – the architect of the Taj in Agra.

We finally convinced our driver to take us for lunch, which was at a nice restaurant called Kalish. After lunch we visited a water wheel, which is apparently a feat of Medieval engineering, but looked to me like a pool with a huge banyan tree.

In the evening we visited the Pathan market, which takes its name from the Afgahns that ruled here. Now there is a green-lit mosque with a spire like a lantern and local fabric and clothes shops on either side of the street. There were no tourists here and very little bargaining. First we visited a Sari shop, which had striking assortment of colourful silk fabrics, many just strewn over the floor. We also visited a jewellery shop, and Kate bought the marriage necklace she had been looking for the whole trip – for a very reasonable price – from a friendly man with green eyes. Just walking down the street was a great experience, the people were incredibly friendly and curious, but without the aggression (and commensurate defensiveness) of some other places we have visited. It was just interesting to see local people shopping as they would normally.

Aurangabad is not much to look at. It is like many other Indian, cities – it is dusty, polluted, crowded, cows stop traffic and a roundabout is not a roundabout without a statue of a freedom fighter on it. It does not have the charm of Jaislamer or the energy or the bright lights of Mumbai, but we had a fantastic stay. Tourist places are touristy because there is something very impressive there, and they are definitely worth seeing. Aurangabad was a different experience though because it is off the trail a little bit. You walk down the street and know that all the hellos will not be followed by a sales pitch.

We had dinner at a Tandoor restaurant. I ordered chicken which Kate ate most of.
We took a car the next day from Aurangabad to Jalgoan. For breakfast we stopped at a vendor on the street and ate fired rice cakes and chai tea, in public, as everyone else does.

On the way to Jalgoan are the Ajanta caves. These caves were much like the Ellora caves, but are entirely Buddhist and cut into mountains overlooking a river and waterfall. They are also famous because they have some of the best preserved cave paintings in India. Historians have theorised that the caves are so well-preserved state because nearly 1500 years ago, the Buddhist dynasty here collapsed very quickly and people fled the caves. From then they were forgotten, until a British official stumbled across them during a tiger hunt.

To get into the caves you must first run a tight gauntlet of hawkers offering you ‘gifts’ of crystals. I am quite weak, so had one thrust into my hand. In the caves we shared a guide with some European tourists who were very unhappy about something to do with the price (which was, in perspective, $2.50 each).

After making our way through the caves and admiring the painting and some incredible, deep monasteries with arched roofs and what looked like a rib cage cut into it, we crossed the river and walked to the top of a nearby hill for a view from a distance. For some reason my guard was down and I accepted another gift from a ‘farmer’, who led me around, pointing out the waterfall and trying to convince me that he was not a salesperson while trying to sell me crystals. The view of the waterfall set against caves in the background was impressive.

We arrived in Jagaon late in the afternoon. Jalgoan is mostly a stop for people visiting the Ellora and Ajanta caves. As we arrived, however, Kate had noticed that one of the tassles on her marriage necklace was broken. We knew there was another outlet of this jewellery store in Jagoan, so we got a tuk-tuk there and tried to sort it out. At first they simply tried to weld it together and paint over it with sparkly gold paint. It looked atrocious and we settled for an exchange (although the pendant was slightly different). In the evening we took a stroll around the street near our hotel. We stopped in at a cotton shop with a very friendly owner (and fixed prices, again) and Kate bought some fabric. My secret Santa acquired a little something on this walk.

We had dinner in a bar with dimmed lights. The lights are dimmed so people hand make under the table deals... apparently.

Our hotel in Jagoan was only 2 minutes from the train station. So, after another 4:30am start, we hopped the train to Omkareshwar. We were in sleeper carriages this time, so the train was chockers with people getting on and off to go to work, chai wallahs wailing down the aisle and people coming past selling what looked like sticks, but are actually portable toothbrushes. The toothbrushes come from the neem tree. People just break off the stick, shave off the outer layer of bark and expose the coarse bristles underneath. We had another conversation about Ricky Ponting, this time with some men working for a pharmecutical company somewhere on the train route. People are generally very friendly, but I will not miss day trains in sleeper class.

From the train station it was another hour’s drive to Omkareshwar. Just as we left the station there was a procession of people in the main street. At the head of the procession was the body of a young woman. She was on a wooden platform, wrapped in cloth but for her face, which, while surrounded in lace, was visible.

The drive to Omkareshwar took us past many cotton and chilli plantations. Piles of chilli lie on the roadside drying in the sun. In many of the fields there are the small tents of nomads with little more than their yellow tarpoulians, their pots and their goats. Almost as common as the cars are wooden carts being pulled by cows with painted horns and pom-poms between their eyes. In the towns that we pass through, there are many more dead dogs than we have seen elsewhere.

On the way we stopped at roadside stall for paranthas (stuffed, fried bread) and saw a buffalo with its head tied to its front, left leg as punishment for being naughtly. We arrived in Omkareshwar by mid-afternoon.

Omkareshwar is a dirt-poor, flyblown place with rake-like holy men and Shiva Lingums everywhere. The air is as thick with superstition and religion as it is with hashish and incencse here.

Omkareshwar is an island at the meeting point of two holy rivers. The island is shaped like an ‘Om’, or a backward “3”. There is an emourmous dam at one end of the river. Our hotel was on the other side of the river, and after checking in we took a walk across the bridge to the central part of Omkareshwar, past a cow painted as a tiger and beggars on either side. Omkareshwar is a very small place, and the central area is a Shiva temple and a collection of yellow tarpaulins, under which vendors sell flowers and chai to pilgrims. The air is very thick under the tarpaulins with incense and the holy-men and their white-painted faces just appear from the incense smoke and disappear again. There were steps leading down to the river, and people bathing there. We stopped for chai with the flies under one of the tarpaulins.
After getting our bearings we crossed back over the river and had afternoon tea at ‘Ganesh rest’ house, run my some very friendly Nepalese. Ganesh rest-house is under siege from monkeys. The owners keep a little jack-russel and an armoury of slingshots to hold back the tide. Occasionally a monkey slips through, races into the kitchen and steals a banana, then sits in a nearby tree and eats it slowly, in full view of guests and staff. I had nutella toast and coffee. Nutella must grow here because I recieved almost a full jar lumped on my plate.

Kate and I spent most of that afternoon relaxing and watching TV. Kate discovered that the laptop had games on it, so that is why this blog-post is so delayed.
The next morning we returned to Ganesh rest house for breakfast, I ventured the museli and Kate did the porridge. We both survived and it were the better for the fruit and fibre. Omkareshwar is so small and isolated, and in many ways so dirty, that we thought if there was ever a place we were going to get sick, this would be it. Thankfully, that never eventuated.

The plan for the day was to walk the 8km circuit around the om-shaped island. After breakfast we crossed the bridge, said hello to the tiger cow and began our stroll, clockwise, around the island. Two minutes in we were stopped for a series of photos by some school girls. We continued along the banks of the river. Pilgrims make this walk quite regularly, so the pathway was well maintained. It wound through numerous straw huts, under which naked holy men would sit cross-legged in a cloud of marijuana smoke and distribute big, toothless smiles. Scatted along the path are little temples and idols covered in flowers or honey and milk. Some idols are little more than a rock painted red with two goggly eyes stuck on. Every house or stall along the way (and there are hundreds) had a lingum or lingums, like blobby rock gardens. Many families take this walk around the island, paying their respects and giving their offerings of flowers to the various gods they encounter on the way.
The river below was flowing fast. We could see numerous areas where the wide water would funnel into a set of rapids. The water looked relatively clean, and as we reached one point of the island, two fast-flowing rivers collided and created big, shallow rapids that the boats struggled to climb their way up.

On the point at the confluence of these two rivers was a little temple with another red, multilimbed god, from which some kids were pilfering the offerings. We went and sat by the waterside. There were odd rockpiles everywhere (like from blair witch project!) and clothes (and rubbish) strewn over the pebbles and boulders leading to the water. People who have experienced hard times or suffering come to the banks of this river, take off their clothes and bathe in it. They then leave put new clothes on and leave the old, tainted life behind.

The path then led up the spine of the mountain, through some abandoned mud-shacks and bangle-stores and small temples. Halfway up, black-faced monkeys started appearing. They were lining either side of the path waiting for someone to give them food. One monkey looked particularly impatient and agitated. I walked past, then Kate walked past, then, as Emma was walking past, the monkey grabbed her pants and would not let go. Kate clapped and advanced towards the monkey, but it hissed and bared it teeth, letting go of Emma and grabbing onto Kate’s leg. I then hissed at the monkey and stomped at it, but this just aggravated it more and it reared its sharp teeth towards me. There was a local family walking up, so, not knowing what else to do, I yelled at a teenage boy to do something about it. Calmly, he did something that I don’t remember in the fuss and the monkey was gone. We all are now terrified of these black-faced monkeys.

Anyway, much good came out of the attack, because this family escorted us through the monkey zone, and once we reached the top of the hill, we all stopped for a chai and exchanged photos and the little hindi/English that we knew. We walked further up the hill with them, to an 80ft Shiva statue painted in full colour. Here they stopped to eat at a place where the food was free for pilgrims, so we said our goodbyes. The path moved past some more ruins of a Hindu Kingdom, to the opposite end of the island, for a view of the dam, and down to the banks of the river, past some 11 or 12 year old girls labouring in their Saris, to the bridge with the tiger cow.

In the afternoon we took a boat tour of the island. Most of the boats are colourfully adorned with tassels and a painted hull. Ours was, aesthetically, the worst boat in the river. It had cloth for a roof, and ageing wooden hull with water sloshing inside. What it lacked in looks, however, it made up for in strength. Along the way there were five or six sets of rapids that the boat had navigate. On one side of the island we would go down with the rapids, on the other we had to go up them. So we bumped down the one side of the island and bashed our way up the other. At one point I though the river had the better of us, as we had attempted to ascend a steep looking rapid to find ourselves up against the rocks and going backwards. Only the intervention of both boys at the front of the boat and a big stick did we make it to the other side.

Upon returning to land we stopped for a chai with flies and a bull chased a kid up the street, we think because he threw a water bomb at him. In the final hours of the day, Kate perused the bangle shops and made some purchases. My Secret Santa acquired two possessions on this sojourn.

We walked back up the hill to our hotel as the sun set. Kids were running up and down beside us, rolling a bike tyre with a stick as they went. Their sisters were in a nearby house, labouring away at the washing. A whole busload of kids pulled over just to run out and shake our hands.

That evening we had dinner at the restaurant and were given a lecture on the trials of the holy men. One category of holy man (they seem to be exclusively men) called Nagus, pledge themselves to chastity. In order to ensure that they do not break this vow, when they graduate from holy man school (there is the equivalent of primary secondary and tertiary education) these men pierce their foreskin and place a ring through it. To the ring they attach a bell.

Omkareshwar is all that is strange and foreign about India squeezed onto a tiny island. It is almost ridiculous to think that Mumbai and this place are on the same planet, let alone the same country. Nowhere so far have I felt so far from home. Apart from Nutella, nothing is familiar. Not the mantras that echo over the river each night at exactly 8pm, not the gak blobs on the side of road that people worship, not the bizarre characters and stories that people follow as their religion, not the rationale behind why people would starve themselves and put a rod though their penis, not the blind 90 year old on the bridge with no hands, not the air raid siren that goes off each morning at 7, not why you would paint a cow as a tiger, and not even the flies.

We left Omkareswar a few days ago for Mandu, and Mandu for Bhopal. Tomorrow we leave Bhopal for Sanchi. I always say it, but I will try to get these more recent places up soon.

Our love to you all.

Kate and Charles.