India Day 3: Road Trip to Agra

December 28, 2009

10:00 a.m. Road Trip to Agra. The countryside from Delhi to Agra in Uttar Pradesh is scenic, splashed mostly with the yellow of the mustard fields. Very long trains are also a common sight, as well as cows, goats, sheep and camels crossing the highways. Lunch was at one of the many roadside dhabas, which offered tasty, filling parathas and curries.

5:00 p.m. Taj Mahal from the back. Free from the thousands of tourists who come to see the Taj Mahal, a little park across the River Yamuna gave us unobstructed views of the Taj Mahal at sunset. The Taj is breathtaking, spectacular, wonderful, unbelievable. It's simply the most beautiful building I have ever seen. We did some sleuthing and crawled through barbed wire onto the river bank itself, and the views were incomparable.

8:00 p.m. Dinner at Peshawari. After checking into our rather forgettable, but adequate, hotel, MS, L and I had drinks and dinner at Peshawari at the Sheraton Agra hotel. Good Muglai food, but Karim's was better.

India Day 2: Old Delhi

Signs of development are everywhere in Delhi. The city is changing, and the people are in a rush to keep up. We walked mostly through Chadni Chowk and the old town today, and the hustle and bustle that surround the historical buildings makes you wonder if this city will look and feel the same in 10 years.

December 27, 2009

11:00 a.m. Presidential House and India Gate drive-by. Drove by the spectacular monuments made by the British in the late 1800s.

12:00 p.m. Jama Masjid. MS parked his car and we took a trip on Delhi's spanking new and shiny subway to the old town. The first big building was the mosque Jama Masjid, which we weren't able to enter because prayers were about to commence. It's the largest mosque in India and built by the Taj Mahal maker, Shah Jahan.

1:00 p.m. Red Fort.  Shah Jahan also built the Red Fort, which is my favorite monument in Delhi. Only great civilizations could have come up with something like this, and it is impressive.

3:00 p.m. Lunch at Paratha Lane. Where we had parathas, of course! And it really is a lane full of paratha shops, but there was also the occasional dairy, which sold yummy lassi.

5:00 p.m. Textile Fair. Yes, we did quite a bit of shopping here. The quality of material is excellent.

8:00 p.m. Dinner at Oh, Calcutta! Bengali food, mostly seafood and oh so delicate. This was a wonderful meal.

10:00 p.m. Watched "Three Idiots".  We watched the Bollywood movie of the moment at a cinema, and it was very, very funny. MS sat in between me and L to do occasional translations from Hindi, but it was easily understandable, and watching the crowd react to the movie was as great an experience as the movie itself.

India Day 1: Forts in Delhi

India!

Many adjectives conjured up by the name corresponds with the truth - exotic, magical, otherworldly, wacky, fascinating. There is much to share.

December 25, 2009

7:00 a.m. Travel to Delhi. It was a white Christmas in The Hague. L and I walked through fresh, wet snow with our travel bags to the train station. I was already wearing shoes for drier weather; my shoes and socks got wet and I had to dry them out on the airplane. My first time to spend Christmas on an airplane (L's second time).

11:30 p.m. The Magical Mr. MS. Eight hours and a 5 1/2 hour time difference later, we were met at the airport by MS, my classmate and buddy from grad school. MS is a walking encyclopedia, Formula 1 race car driver, human rights lawyer, snooty gourmand, and is, in a word, fabulous.  We stayed in Chez MS while in Delhi and travelled around with MS tours.

December 26, 2009

12:00 p.m. Humayun's Tomb. After overcoming slight jet-lag by ingesting a delicious idli breakfast, we saw Humayun's tomb. Humayun was the second Mughal emperor, and the construction of the tomb was overseen by his senior wife in the 1560s.

2:30 p.m. Lunch at Gunpowder. Fantastic melange of Indian cuisine, with a bias towards Southern Indian. The most interesting item on the menu was "buffalo", but which was, actually, beef (of course generally prohibited in Delhi).

4:00 p.m. Hauz Khas. Originally a madrasa (school), Hauz Khas in now a pretty park interspersed with interesting and well-preserved ruins.

7:00 p.m. Hazrat Nizamuddin. MS and his partner AM gave L a skull cap and me a shawl, and took us to the shrine of Sheikh Nizamuddin Aulia, a Chishti saint. No pictures allowed unfortunately, but visiting this holy and peaceful area had to be one of my most unique experiences in Delhi.

8:00 p.m. Dinner at Karim's. Mughlai food - the kind of food known as "Indian food" all over the world. This place had the best kebabs and tandoor chicken I have ever tasted.

10:30 p.m. Drinks at a random dive in Defence Colony. An important discovery was made here: Masala peanuts.

Beaune

Still sunburned from Africa, L and I returned to the Low Countries and snow. Thoroughly tired, we totally forgot that we signed up with work colleagues for a wine tour in Burgundy, France that weekend. Still marveling at how we could go from eating local ugali in East Africa to sipping le vin de Bourgogne in two days, L and I managed to enjoy ourselves. All we had to do was hop into a mini van with six other winos after all.

Our Gite was in the little village of Beaune, which was beautiful. The winter light gave it an eerie quality, and though I expect this place would be glorious in the summertime, I wouldn't mind going back here again next winter. Here are some pictures I took during the wine tour (pretty good haul - three wineries and 20 bottles, including some Cremant for the holidays):

We also visited the local Hospices de Beaune, a perfectly preserved hospital from the Middle Ages:

Uganda

We really had fun here, but I don't have any pictures to show for it.

The highlight of the trip was white water rafting through Jinja Falls - also known as the source of the White Nile.  No cameras allowed on the boats, of course, so I waited two weeks for the DVD they promised of our spectacular spills and falls through six (6!) Grade 5 rapids along the Nile.

Smart of them though, as the DVD appears to be copy protected. In any case, you can imagine us being the people in these pictures, since we did pretty much the same crazy things they did (I prefer my day job).

Oh, one picture featuring Kampala - a pretty enough city except for these gigantic, scary looking birds, which are the local pigeons:

Lake Manyara

After a great safari day, L and I woke up the next morning to the sound of really loud breathing. We opened the balcony doors and saw this right below:

Not at all the kind of buffalo that I'm used to, which are of the gentle, docile variety.

We left Ngorongoro Crater after breakfast and made our way down to Lake Manyara, a smaller national park. Unlike Ngorongoro, where all the animals were concentrated in the center and almost posing for pictures, visiting Lake Manyara was probably more like a proper safari: we had to search for the animals.

It was a good thirty minutes or so before we saw them. First, the graceful impalas:

Nearby were baboons, who stay close to the impalas as a natural protection against predators like cheetahs and leopards:

This park had A LOT of giraffes, and it was my favorite animal to look at:

There were also many, many elephants. One gave us quite a scare, as it bounded towards our vehicle and swerved only at the last moment:

The others were not as scary:

There were also a lot of hippos:

And monkeys:

We unfortunately had to catch an early flight to Kampala the next day, so we had to leave the park after only a few hours. We spent the night at Arusha Coffee Lodge in Arusha, and as its name suggests, it is in the middle of a coffee plantation: