Indian Thali Days

A trip to India is always difficult to describe, to do justice to. On this, my fourth visit, it presents no less of a conundrum. Chris mentioned to me that he felt our experiences there had been a bit like a thali - a taster of lots of different bits and pieces - and as I look back, this description seems to fit perfectly. Our time there conjures up a hodge podge of memories and experiences, tasty morsels of Indian culture that have all come together to make a perfectly balanced and truly wonderful travelling experience. The only thread, or staple (to maintain the culinary metaphor) binding it all together is the train trips that took us from A to B, often proving as experiential themselves as their destinations and introducing us to an intriguing cross section of India's vast people; otherwise each place or region that we visited has had a unique charm and focus of it's own enabling us to sample many different facets of the country in a fairly short space of time.

Playing with ice!

I have been utterly useless in updating the blog for a good couple of months now and the Foto Fridays have all but dried up BUT I intend to be a lot better now that xmas and new year are out of the way and we are in a bit more of a routine.

Chris and I are now in New Zealand. We arrived here a couple of weeks ago and have been racing around the South Island seeing what there is to see - more on this in future posts.This week's highlight was most certainly trekking on the Franz Josef glacier on the West Coast - we opted for a full day of walking around on the glacier, crampons and all and loved every minute of it. I'm a little concerned that the more mountain activities we carry on doing, the more likely it is that I lose Chris to a life as an explorer or something - we think he must have mountain folk in his ancestry somewhere as he is like a small child whenever near ice or snow!

For more photos of the trip (and many more to come once I can get a good enough connection to upload everything up to NZ) please just click on the big 'pathological picture taker' image on the right sidebar to take you through to my Picasa photo albums, else I have just done a mass facebook upload of a fair few so you can take a peek there.

More to come soon...promise.

Jekyll and Hyde

'You either love it or you hate it', 'be prepared for a culture shock', 'the poverty is overwhelming', 'beware of Delhi belly!' these are all things that people say when they hear you are going to India and to a degree they are all true. However, having been many times before, both alone and with family, friends, and Chris, I was pretty sure I knew what to expect and that I was going to LOVE it. Strangely this was not initially the case on this visit and for once I saw the side of India that people who 'hate' the place, or who can't quite stand the chaos, must experience, its 'dark' side if you like.