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Showing posts with the label Ranthambore

India update: monkeys and deer and TIGERS, oh my!

Days 5 and 6 The heat continues - it is around 116 degrees Farenheit each day.  We have never in our lives experienced this kind of heat, but the locals consider it normal for this time of year.  It is breaking 100 year records, but they are still outside hauling bricks on their heads, pullings weeds, and doing mason work.  In fact, they still serve you HOT CHAI, which of course, you drink, because it is offered!  (Also, because even if they offered you "iced chai" (is there such a thing??) you couldn't accept it because weak immuned Westerners need to avoid all tap water, including ice, lest they come down with a case of "Delhi Belly"...  We took a train from Agra to the train to Sawai Madhopur.  This was not a super fast brand new train like the one we took before, but a "normal" train.  Well, normal except that our car had some semblance of cooling (not what we would really call "air conditioning" in the USA but it did the trick and t...
India - Days 3 and 4: Days 3 and 4 were spent in Agra and can be described in one word:  GARY.  "Gary" (can this really be his given Indian name??) was our guide in Agra.  We booked our vacation through a travel agent, who made arrangements with an in country Indian travel agent for each city.  This is NOT how we normally travel, we have never used a travel agent before.  It felt so strange (and a bit pretentious...) to us to PAY someone to organize it all.  Plus, normally when we travel we like to do the NON-TOURISTY things, so by booking a "tour" we worried we would be sort of restricted and not get to explore like we like to do. Well, we have now decided that going through an agent in this instance was, for us, probably the right thing to do.  Even LITTLE things - getting from the train station to the hotel - are bizarrely different in India.  On our train ride to Agra we ended up seated by what seemed to be the only other Americans on the...