1. Everywhere you stay will ask to hold on to your Passport for 10 minutes. This is hugely unsettling if you're not sure what's going on. Turns out there's a law that all hotels have to keep meticulous records of their foreign visitors - where you're from, how long you're in the country, where you ...
India-lite
Last night, I snuck away from the guest house after sunset to take in an outdoor movie. A café at the next beach south was screening The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel on their patio. Where better to enjoy a feel-good flick set in Jaipur than when I was myself just a week removed from having seen the ...
Hey, guess what.
So, as I'm going in and out of places - hotels, restaurants, wherever - and meeting travelers from all over the world, one phrase keeps turning up, this idea of this time we're in now ending and the inevitable return to "real life." More people have said it to me than I can count, and I'm sure I've ...
Wherein the bite actually IS worse
If you're keeping track via Twitter, you saw yesterday in 140 characters at a time just what freaking out while you're traveling alone abroad looks like. Stupid, adventurous me decided to walk a different way to the beach yesterday. What's the worst that could happen? Getting bitten by a stray ...
And a dash of curiosity
I mentioned to my hosts last night that I might like to take a cooking class while I'm here. Without missing a beat, Janet offered to phone in the morning and see if I could be added to a class two fellow guests were attending that day. Which is how I found myself this morning with four fellow ...
Directional Shift
After exploring the vibrant Varanasi, I trekked back to the small airport where I'd been just three days before to move on to the next leg of the trip: Goa. The day was a long one. I arrived at the tiny, four-gate airport so early I couldn't check in for my flight yet; they hadn't even assigned it ...
Blurry around the edges
As I linger this morning getting ready to head out to explore another day in Varanasi, I'm struck by two things. First, how dang hot it is! 11am and it's easily above 90* in the shade, which is in short supply. I'm in cotton leggings and a thin tunic and I'm still sweating as I sit and enjoy black ...
In the hotel lobby
The other day, before we left Jaipur, we struck up a conversation with one of the lovely young attendants at the hotel. She told us about her hometown, quick to assure us it was not a village but a "proper district" several kilometers away. She'd moved to Jaipur for work, lived with a few other ...
On the River Ganga
I'm safely nestled away in my room at Hotel Alka in Varanasi, complete with a personal balcony overlooking the mighty Ganges river, a body of water that from what I've seen of it so far rivals quite easily its river counterparts in other parts of the world. Getting here was an adventure to say the ...
The Road to Jaipur
Where did we leave off? New Delhi, I believe? It's been just a few days since my previous post and yet, I feel like I've gone from outsider and observer to guest, participant in this crazy whirlwind of activity - sights, smells, textures, tastes. If you let it, this other side of the world will ...
