Iris & Tuval in India and Thailand: דצמבר 2007

Jaisalmer - Rajasthan

Jaisalmer, "The Golden City", of Rajasthan. The town stands on a ridge of yellowish sandstone, crowned by a fort, and many houses where people are still living.. Many of the houses and temples are finely sculptured. It lies in the heart of the Thar Desert. We also found a nice guest house inside the fort. We spent there one week and also went on a short camel safari in which we spent a beautiful night on a sand dune in the desert.

Iris in the main market at the foot of the fort

The view from the roof of our guest house

Sunset in the fort - the stones get a golden color

The man made lake near the fort

The amazing fort of Jaislamer

Lunch in the camel safari

Morning chai on the sand dune

Sunrise

Pushkar - Rajasthan

Pushkar in Rajasthan is a small village on the banks of a small lake. We stayed there for 10 days, resting and shopping – Iris :). We also saw the Divali, Festival of Light. The village was light with fireworks all night. We ran across many people we met in places we’ve traveled in India before. We stayed in a nice hotel with papaya trees and a swimming pool! We even ate labane in laffa (well almost labane…) for 20 rupee (2 shekels) in a small place in the middle of the market where lots of people like to get together when they get tired from all the shopping.

"The Laffa joint"

Eating healthy breakfast

Sunset at the lake

Iris liked the monkeys -we called them "kruvy" because they look like moshe ufnik from Sesame Street

Orcha - Madhya Pradesh

Orcha (“hidden place”) is a sleepy little village but it was once the capital city of the mighty Bundelkhand Empire and was founded in the 16th century A.D. We stopped there on the way to Delhi for 2 days. In the village we saw the ancient, and also old wall paintings describing life at that time.

Khajuraho - Madhya Pradesh

After Varanasi we went to Khajuraho in Madhya Pradesh. This small village used to be a capital of one of the dynasties in India at about 1000AD. It is surrounded by the remains of many temples and is considered to be very beautiful and peaceful. The temples are unique since they were not destroyed during the various wars in India, and because they have many erotic statues with figures from the Kama Sutra. We took a night train to a town called Satna and then a taxi. The train was 3 hours late and it had even more delay during the night so we arrived 5 hours after what we had planned, but we joined a Spanish couple and shared a taxi so we compensated a little for the delay. Khajuraho is a nice village and was a good change after all the noise in Varanasi but unfortunately it’s impossible to walk in the street without having the shopkeepers jump on you and call “come look my shop”… “so tomorrow???”…”I will be waiting!!!”.

The temples

We said Kama Sutra....

We rented bicycles for touring the village

Varanasi - Uttar Pradesh

From Rishikesh we went to Haridwar and took a 24 hours train to Varanasi. Varanasi is an ancient on the banks of the Ganges river. It’s holy to the Hindi. It has 3 names: Kashi – the first name, Banares – the Muslim name, and Varansi – the modern name. We had a great time in Varanasi and stayed for almost two weeks, mostly in Phandai Ghat (Ghat = stairs to the river) in the old city. It’s a lovely place with many small street and allies with lots of big cows and many music and silk shops. Varanasi is a busy Indian city with a lot of noise and air pollution, but very colorful with lots of things to see and to do. We saw the evening Hindu ceremonies ("Pooja"), We took a boat to see the sunrise on the Ganga river and all the Indian doing there laundry there and washing, we saw the places where they burn their dead people, we went to the local university to see the local Chemistry faculty and we met a local researcher in chemistry who declared he wants to start the first biosensors company in India and he offered Iris to join his team..., this time the Hindu also had a nine days festival - the Durga festival, so we saw them in the temples and the Ganga during their prayers. They built statues of their gods for the festival and in the last day they throw them to the Ganga river. We also went to the new mall and saw a bollywood movie which took 3 hours and was very amusing.

A colorful street