More dust in northern India

After a few days in dusty, crowded, and did I mention smoggy Delhi, it was a relief to get on an air-con train for a 20 hour train ride west, almost to the Pakistan border. (and while we were on the train there was a bombing in Karachi, Pakistan that killed 130 or more people: http://www.cnn.com/2007/WORLD/asiapcf/10/27/pakistan.bhutto/?iref=mpstoryview

The four of us (Stefan, Bernie, Bernie's father John and John's partner Sue) had our own private compartment, so what if there were a few cockroaches crawling about? For more on train travel in India, see this site that was a great help for us: http://www.seat61.com/India.htm

Our destinatation, Jaisalmer, was once an important stop on a trading route, and is far smaller than any other city we've seen in India: a good part of the 60,000 or so residents live inside the old fort, and you can see the town ending and the desert beginning just a couple km away.

After a day chilling in the desert, it was back on the train for another 13 hours, heading east to Jaipur. But we were so tired of dust and crowds that we didn't explore too much of the city: John and Sue went to a temple outside town where there are separate bathing areas for men, women and monkeys, while Bernie visited the City Palace of the maharajas of Jaipur (they were expert polo players), and Stefan stayed at the hotel and worked on his thesis!

Delhi

Delhi is very different than Mumbai. It's all spread out and transportation is via bicycle or auto-rickshaw instead of by taxi. There are far more touts and harrassment in general. We visited the spots where both Indhira Gandhi and Mahatma Gandhi were assassinated. We went on a day trip to Agra to see the Taj Mahal, we saw India's largest Mosque and spent a lot of time trying to navigate various modes of transportation and haggling with autorickshaw drivers.

Mumbai

In typical Indian fashion we arrived late in the evening in Mumbai, and our one checked bag had not made our connecting flight from Paris (I guess a long connection is just as dangerous as a short connection for losing luggage). After some strange customs formalities regarding the missing bag, we were now in India. There was bumper to bumper traffic at 1am in Mumbai, perhaps partially due to Ramadan, but probably just generally the way things are. It was hot and humid all of the time in Mumbai.

We spent several nights there and were led around town by Rafique Baghdadhi, a Hindi film critic who writes for an Indian economic magazine in Mumbai. It was sort of a friend of a friend of a friend sort of thing. Rafique showed us all around town, and familiarized us with the joys of drinking at the Press Club, and eating Mughlai (muslim, non-veg) cuisine in the muslim quarter of Mumbai after dark during ramadan. We also tried some Paan, a sort of fibrous, chewy concoction made up of the narcotic beetelnut, which was sort of gross. After a few days we took the overnight train to Delhi and met up with Bernie's father John at the train station.

Mauritius

Sorry for the long delay in postings.

We left Cape Town around October 1 on our marathon journey to Mauritius via Amsterdam and Paris. Of course, this would not go smoothly as we only had a couple of hours for each layover and upon arrival at the airport in Cape Town we were informed that our flight from AMS to CDG had been cancelled. Not too big of a deal, we were put on the next flight to Paris which left us with a short one hour layover at one of the world's most absurd airports, Charles du Gaulle. Long story short, we missed our flight to Mauritius and spent several hours working with Air France to get us there on the next flight which was operated by Air Mauritius. Luckily, we got seats on that flight and were on our way to the Indian Ocean with only a 5 hour delay. We found the service onboard Air Mauritius to be superior to that of Air France.

After arrival, very little time was wasted with Stefan jumping into his open water scuba certification course. He did the entire course in three days (including reading several hundred pages of text) and his german instructor Larissa did a great job even though she was suffering from a cold. After Stefan finished his class we rented a car and drove around the island a little, visiting the central highlands and a Hindu holy lake with a gigantic statue of the god Shiva the destroyer.

We later went on a dive together (Bernie's first dive in nearly 10 years) and saw lots of beautiful coral and sponges.

We said goodbye to Mauritius after one short week on the beautiful island and flew back to Paris where we would spend the night before flying the next morning to Mumbai. As our 747 was about 150 meters above the runway at CDG, our jumbo jet aborted the landing in what was the most knucklebiting flying experience of our lives. For several seconds we weren't sure if our jet was going to be ripped in two or not. Apparently these are called "go-arounds" and are relatively common at large, busy airports when the runway hasn't been cleared fast enough of the prior aircraft. In my mind, that is a near-miss.