Next was Chitwan National Park, where we went on a canoe ride followed by a jungle trek.

There were plenty of leeches waiting in the long grass.

This is as close as we came to the park’s wild tigers. 

The guide instructed us that if we came across a rhino and it charged, it was best to run in a zigzag pattern and try and make it to a tree.

We later went on an elephant safari.  The rhinos don’t seem to mind the presence of elephants.

Some of the palace gates were protected by spikes to discourage war elephants from ramming them.

The morning of the day we arrived, the government had demolished half of Orccha’s main street.  The locals had been fighting a dispute with the government for years over illegally building shopfronts that extended too far into the street.  The government had plans to widen the streets to cater for increased tourism and so they bulldozed the shop fronts.

We visited some cenotaphs where the rajas had been cremated.  It was supposed to close at 5.00 in the evening.  We tried to leave at 4.45, but the caretaker had gone home early and locked us in.  Some locals came by to see what was going on.

Fortunately they went and got the caretaker, who let us out.

After Orccha, we took a night train.  As it was India, there was of course a cow waiting on the platform as well.

We then spent a day sailing down the Ganges, India’s holy river.  Our boat men were quite happy to drink the river water, even though at one point, we spotted a dead body floating in the river.

We camped overnight on the banks.  Of course, there were cows at the camp site.

We also got visited by wild dogs.  During the night they surrounded the camp site and howled.  Well, at least that’s what the rest of the people in the group told me.  I slept through the howling dogs.

We then arrived at Varanasi, one of the world’s oldest cities and is the holiest of all Hindu cities.   According to Hinduism, if you die in Varanasi you are exempt from the cycle of reincarnation and go straight to heaven.  It should then come as no surprise that the city is quite crowded.

The city is also known for its ghats – stairs leading down to the river.  This is where people go to bathe in the sacred river.  There are also ghats where bodies are cremated.

Perhaps the world’s most optimistic sign.

Varanasi school bus.

Cows are sacred animals in India, so you don’t see beef on the menu at restaurant.  But they must be good for something.  Varanasi milk deliveries.

It is one of the most popular places to see movies in India.

India’s film industry regularly produces double the number of films in a year that Hollywood does and is a big part of Indian culture.

It could be argued that Bollywood movies are a joyous celebration of music, dance, life and love. Another interpretation is that they are chauvinistic, materialistic pieces of badly acted derivative wish fulfilment drivel. I leave it to you, dear reader, to ruminate upon which side of the argument my own views fall.

We saw a film called Barfi, which is this year’s submission for India’s entry for consideration as Best Foreign Film at the Oscars.

It is not a typical Bollywood film and has hardly any dance scenes.  It is the story of a deaf and mute man who needs to raise money for his father’s operation, so he kidnaps an autistic woman. Imagine if Charlie Chaplin did a remake of Rain Man.

It is an interesting experience to see a movie in India, as the audience clapped and cheered and whistled as the story progressed.

A review at the New Delhi TV service says “Barfi! comes as close to being a modern masterpiece as cinematically possible. To miss it would be a crime. To embrace it is to serenade the sublime.”

Maybe the reviewer just doesn’t get out that much.

Exceptions such as Barfi aside, Bollywood films are known for adapting North American cultural icons and adding an understated depth and complexity lacking from the Hollywood version.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0_4C7TDyVfs

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0HpKe1lUo5I

Indian cinema doesn’t just consist of Bollywood, there are also Tamil-language films, such as Enthiran (or Endhiran), an Indian take on the Terminator, filled with some amazing action spectacles.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7yBnl_krN_U

Sadly, the film is marred by the need to include dance numbers.  A film featuring an unstoppable killer robot somehow features a dance routine called Kiliminjaro – filmed at Machu Picchu.

 httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=35Q8InfNpMo

It has an interesting atmosphere – decaying buildings and the faded glory of once important dynasties (the maharajas in the region were supposed to be descended from Lord Krishna).  The hall was full of stuffed tigers, trophy heads and paintings of the maharaja.

We met the maharaja’s son who told us “India is such a dark country, that you need to look at it through a special lens.”

We had a walk through the town itself and met some of the locals.

A monkey among the pigeons.

Then it was on to Jaipur, known as the Pink City.  When Prince Albert visited they painted the buildings orange. Well they are supposed to be pink, but they look orange.
The Hawa Mahal, is known as the Palace of the Winds.  It was built with lots of windows so that the concubines could see what was going on outside.

Jaipur’s Amber fort.

Because just thinking about turbans makes me hungry.

They are going to have to work harder to sell me on the delights of Rajasthani cuisine.

Jaipur City Palace

Elsewhere, we encountered some tasty Indian snacks.

Delhi is a crowded, dirty city and at times the traffic can be chaotic.

In City of Djinns: A Year in Delhi, William Dalrymple talks about how much he enjoys reading the Times of India and its interesting use of English such as government ministers air-dashing to scenes of tragedy.

My favorite item is, however, the daily condoling.  If the Times is to be believed, Indian politicians like nothing better than a quick condole; and certainly barely a day passes without a picture of, say, the Chief Minister of Haryana condoling Mrs Parvati Chaduhuri over the death of Mr Devi Chaudhuri, the director-general of All-India Widgets.  Indeed, condoling shows every sign of becoming a growth industry.  If a businessman has died but is not considered important enough to be condoled by the Chief Minister, it is becoming fashionable for his business colleagues to take out an illustrated advertisement and condole him themselves.  The language of these advertisements tends to be even more inspired than that of the Times news columns.  In my diary, I copied down this example from a November 1989 issue:

Sad Demise
With profound grief we have to condole the untimely passing of our beloved general manager MISTER DEEPAK MEHTA, thirty four years, who left us for heavenly abode in tragic circumstances (beaten to death with bedpost).  Condole presented by bereft of Mehta Agencies (Private) Limited.

Perhaps the most striking testament to the sea-change in Indian English in the forty years since Independence lies not in what has survived – and been strangely, wonderfully mutated – but in what has died and completely disappeared.
The best guide to such linguistic dodos is Hobson Jobson: A Glossary of Anglo-Indian Colloquial Words and Phrases, originally published by John Murray in 1903. The book was written as a guide to those words which had passed from Sanskrit, Urdu, Persian and Arabic into English, and the list is certainly extraordinary: every time you wear pyjamas or a cummerbund; if ever you sit on the veranda of your bungalow reading the pundits in the newspapers or eat a stick of candy; indeed even if you are haunted by ghouls or have you cash stolen by thugs – then you are using a branch of English that could never have developed but for the trading and colonizing activities of the East India Company.
Yet perhaps the most interesting aspect of Hobson Jobson is how many of its words and phrases are stone cold dead, now utterly incomprehensible to a modern reader.  In 1903 an Englishman could praise a cheroot as "being the real cheese" (from the Hindi chiz, meaning thing) or claim his horse was the "best goont in Tibet" (from the Hindi gunth, meaning a pony); and whether he was in the middle of some shikar (sport) relaxing with his friends in their chummery (bachelor quarters) or whoring with his rum-johny (mistress, from the Hindi ramjani, a dancing girl) he might reasonably expect to be understood.

We then took the train to Agra, India’s tourist hub, and home to the Taj Mahal.
Photos don’t do it justice, it is an amazing building.