All Good Things Must Come to an End

Goodbye, loyal blog-readers! Tomorrow we begin our multi-day journey home (via Hong Kong & LA, where we're spending a few nights and seeing some friends).

It's been the trip of a lifetime! And for the trip awards...We agree that our Favorite Activity was probably the Machu Picchu trek, way back in Peru (with the Nile cruise coming in a close second); the Most Different/Interesting Country was India (and the Best Food although Turkey deserves an honorable mention for the Iskender Kebab); the Pleasant Surprise award goes to China; Most Insane City goes to Cairo; and Most Memorable Sight goes to....yes, you guessed it...the surprise barefoot TEMPLE FULL OF RATS in India!

Thanks for following along on our round-the-world adventure. Happy holidays & we'll see you soon!

Foiled!

This is as close as we got to the Great Wall today...(don't worry, that's not our van). We tried to go to the Great Wall today to do a 8K hike, but when we were almost there, our guide decided that it would not be possible to make it there and hike, due to the weather.

Beijing!

After 72 hours in bed (I like to say it was SARS but Jeff and Chinese TV ads remind me that SARS has been eradicated, so I guess it was just a nasty cold), I am back! We overnight trained it to Beijing, and today we vistited Tiananmen Square, the Forbidden City, and some of the Olympic venues (which were indeed very cool). There's a nice layer of smog hanging over the city, which makes for dim photos, but here's a shot from the Square, note Mao's portrait in the center.

Anyone for a game of street ping pong? (Cousin Scott beware, I haven't actually been traveling around the world for the past three months, but have been attending an intensive ping pong camp to hone my skills for the annual holiday competition. This kid is 8-and-under province champion and I beat him 21-15.)

We are now in Pingyao, China, southwest of Beijing. We arrived this morning (Dec. 5) to a biting chill... a cold front came through NE China last night and it is FREEZING. Even the locals seem unsettled by the weather. Pingyao is an historic merchant town and now a popular tourist destination for the Chinese (though not so much in this weather). The old city wall and moat are still intact, and inside the city walls Pingyao is well preserved with old buildings lacking the in-your-face commercialism that we've seen elsewhere in China... no bootleg North Face jackets or Lacoste shirts here. Krista is very sick, but hopefully the combination of western pharmaceuticals and Chinese herbal remedies will have her feeling better by the time we're off for Beijing in a few days.

The famous Terracotta Warriors in Xi'an. This is a shot from one part of a tomb from a maniacal Chinese emperor from 2000 years ago... To make sure he would be protected in the afterlife, he hhad his minions spend 40 years creating an army thousands strong of terracotta warriors to surround the tomb where he would be buried. Apparently no two warriors are the same. Soon after he died, his tomb and many of the terracotta warriors were destroyed, then left dormant until the 1970's when Chinese farmers pulled up some fragments of the tomb when drilling a well.

Krista in the dining car on the highest railway on Earth... we were traveling above 15,000 feet for most of the first day on the train from Lhasa, Tibet to Xi'an China. It was a 36 hour journey in total with beautiful mountain scenery... very enjoyable, except we shared a sleeping compartment with a very ill woman who got Krista incredibly sick (hence I have been called in off the bench as back-up blogger).

Yaks

The yak is the king of Tibet. Yak meat, yak butter, yak milk, yak yarn, yak bone jewelry...I even had spaghetti with meat (yak) sauce. Although you may not think of Buddhists as carnivores, out of necessity, Tibetan Buddhists have traditionally eaten yak meat. Here is one pretty guy amongst the prayer flags at the Ganden monestary near Lhasa.

The Modern Monk

Visiting the monestaries, we were able to see a little bit of the daily life of the monks. Yes, they make food, pray, read...but we also saw one monk chatting away on his cell phone while giving blessings to the foreheads of the pilgrims.

We spent the day touring a couple of monestaries and the Dalai Lama's former summer palace. Oh, the odor of burning yak butter! So subtle, yet so memorable...I think I am beginning to smell like melted yak butter.

Monks on the roof of a temple, measuring gold that will be used to paint the temple.

You can see a prayer wheelin the left hand of the second pilgrim.

You can see a prayer wheelin the left hand of the second pilgrim.

Not that kind of Pilgrim

There are very few other western tourists here, as only fools like us decide to go to Tibet in December. However, there are many religious pilgrims who have made their way to Lhasa to visit the palaces and temples, bringing with them vats of melted yak butter, which they pour into containers inside holding wicks to create candles. Some carry prayer beads and prayer wheels, which they spin, chanting, while they circle the temples and palaces in a clockwise manner (clockwise for Buddhists, counter clockwise for the Bon, Tibet's native religion). The particularly devout prostrate themselves (see photo for people in various stages of laying down before the temple) before the temple OR if you are really intense, you make the pilgrimage from your village by taking 3 steps, prostrating, (and slidng some extra feet with knee pads, a long apron, and wooden pads on your hands for protection) and then continuing on in this manner til you get where you're going. We saw a fair number of people doing this yesterday. They looked really really tired.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Happy Thanksgiving from Tibet! We arrived in Lhasa yesterday, and spent the day getting used to the altitude (it's about 12,000 feet here and we were struggling a little). We have eaten yak dumplings and checked out the Dalai Lama's (former) winter palace (see photo), the center of Tibetan Buddhism for about 500 years. The Dalai Lama now resides in Daramsala, India, as he fled Tibet in 1959. The palace contains photos and depictions of the Dalai Lamas prior to the present one, but none of the present one, as it is apparently illegal to even possess his photo.

It's cold. Our hotel restaurant is on the roof (convenient in summer, ill conceived this time of year) and we wore hats and gloves to breakfast, where the marmalade and butter were frozen.

There were red pandas too...poor red pandas don't get the attention that the giant black and white guys get. Apparently they are more closely related to racoons than the giant pandas.

Panda-monium

Today we went to the Panda Breeding Center, near Chengdu. We saw probably 30 or more pandas, of various ages (including a nursery where about 8 3-4 month old babies were being raised. The babies couldn't walk yet, they just sort of flopped around and looked adorable). We were lucky to get there in the morning to catch them at feeding time, and some of the one year olds were pretty playful. Not this gal...

Some local delicacies

My tummy growled when I saw these pig snouts hanging on a bamboo rod. It was hard to turn them down, along with other local delicacies which include fried dried rat meat and stuffed snails.
Never fear...we will not go hungry. The dumplings are delicious and we have even located pork buns, aka baozi, aka hom bao, my favorite treat!

We went into a cave called the Water Cave (famous for the chance to go mud bathing and swimming, although in the chilly weather we only went knee high) and at our guide's insistence, crawled through a 5 meter gap in the rocks that was a pretty tight squeeze. After crawling through first on my belly I did not think Jeff would be able to make it, but here he emerges, victorious!!

We spent the day today hiking, biking & spelunking in the countryside, outside of Yangshuo. We opted not to get the tandem bike, which was a mistake, in retrospect!

We definitely aren't in India anymore...check out the jacket I dug out of my bag, we walked off the plane and I instantly felt like it was Christmas! It may have also been due to the bizarre lit up fake palm trees outside of the airport. The town we are in also feels like an American ski town...narrow streets, crisp air, lots of bars and restaurants, with "mountains" in the distance.

This character, we learned, means "How beautiful the landscape here! We should study and work hard when we are young."

That's a lot of observation and propaganda, all rolled into one!

China!

We arrived in China last night, and are now in Yangshuo, a city in southwestern China. As you can see, the scenery is pretty unusual. Apparently this type of topography is called karst. I am not sure what we expected from China, but we've found it to be surprisingly developed, and are pleasantly surprised to find the hottest, strongest showers since Argentina! It'll be hard to leave.

The Delhi transportation scene is pretty intense (this bus is packed inside, hence the roof riders). We also saw as many as 12 people somehow crammed into autorickshaws on the highway between Delhi and Agra (note, there's room for about 3 adults, if you squish a bit, in the backseat of an autorickshaw. 3 is also the "legal limit" for passengers). Take the crowding, throw in some cows and buffalo on the highway, motorcycles carrying families of four, and totally insane driving (no seatbelts anywhere, believe me, we have looked hard every time), and you've got a typical car trip. Mom, I don't think you'd like it very much.

Made it! We went to see the Taj Mahal at sunrise. Our photos aren't as stunning as the postcards...there was a pretty thick fog (some of this was fog, some was unfortunately pollution we think) but not so much that you couldn't catch the reflection in the pool.

We had an authentic 24 hours in Agra, hanging out with our taxi driver, who suggested various meal items for us to try and was a pretty big character. He played us some popular Indian music, including a song called "Singh is King," (featuring Snoop Dogg) from the movie of the same name, on his cell phone/mp3 player. We're looking forward to putting it in our Netflix queue.

Snake Charmer

Jeff, posing with two new friends outside of a tomb on the way to Agra from Delhi. We arrived in Delhi after taking a 13 hour overnight train from Bikaner. It was rough. They were all sold out of first class tix, so we got second class sleeper tickets. There were people everywhere...sitting many to a "bed," and an unfortunate number were sleeping on the floor outside of the toilet in standing water. My unclean bunk was looking pretty good in comparison, after I came back from my trip to the toilet. After nearly being crushed trying to exit the train (we should have followed the crowd and passed our bags out the train windows rather than trying to move counter to the flow of human traffic coming on to the train as we tried to get off with our backpacks), we had a number of station mishaps, couldn't get a train ticket to Agra, and ended up hiring a driver for an outrageous fee to take us to Agra and back to see the Taj Mahal. Never was there more pressure on a monument to impress us, after that saga!

Our "hotel" in the desert. That's the moon up there, not the sun!

Scenes from a desert village.

Camel Safari

After the rat temple, camels are a welcome sight. Although they smell a little like sour milk, they are pretty sweet. We did a 2 night, 3 day camel "safari" out into the desert near the Pakistan border, riding by day and camping by night, which was really unique and fun. However, riding a camel is not very smooth, and I had some battle wounds in the tailbone region before day one was through.

Rat-tastic

Yes. We are in the rat temple. There are THOUSANDS (this is in no way an exaggeration) of rats. They are running around. They are feasting on the food that is made for them by the vat in the corner. In spite of the fact that they are well fed and sheltered, their fur looks matted and funky. (Note that we are aware that 30,000 people die of rabies each year in India, according to Lonely Planet.) There is fear in our eyes. There are rats scurrying around our toes. We are sweating. Our taxi driver wants us to follow him into a hallway, to get to another part of the temple...we are frozen in our tracks, staring at the hallway. It is like running the gauntlet. Hundreds of rats scurry back and forth, wall to wall, while people shuffle through, with nowhere to run or hide. We do not want to offend our taxi driver, who is kissing the walls and having a generally wonderful religious experience. So we suck it up and go, rat turds and sugary rat food crunching beneath our feet. We have agreed that it was possibly the most bizarre experience of our lives.

This being a temple, we are BAREFOOT, of course.

But what is on that sign, hanging above the temple?
We had read in Lonely Planet about a bizarre temple about 30k from our intended destination, where it is believed that the rats are the reincarnated souls of either a goddess's family or story tellers (different stories in different guidebooks). We wonder, could this be it?

Here I am, outside of the seemingly normal looking temple. Let's go in, shall we?

From Kerala, we flew up to Jodhpur, the "blue city," in the state of Rajastan. Ah, Rajastan. This is where things start to get interesting! From Jodhpur, we needed to get to Bikaner, a city about 70 kilometers from the Pakistan border, where we would embark on our camel safari. After some hard days of traveling, we decided to go by car, rather than by train. Oh, and thank goodness we did, because otherwise we would have missed a very special temple that our taxi driver wanted to stop at along the way...

After returning from the beach, we went to a show of traditional Keralan (Kerala is one of the states in India, in the south) play/art/dance demonstration at which this awesomely bizarre character was highlighted.

Backpacker Beach Paradise

Jeff and I have landed in backpackers' beach paradise. We ditched our prior rough plan to head to a wildlife reserve (where supposedly there are elephants and tigers, although we have yet to meet anyone who has been there and actually seen anything more than a couple of monkeys) and opted instead for a beach town pretty far south down the coast called Varkala. Good choice! It's like the best beach we've been to in Thailand or Vietnam, but better. Jeff commented that its kind of like the beach in "The Beach," but less creepy. So what turned into 2 nights' stay has become 4, and we will be here until we are forced to leave to fly back north for our camel safari in the desert.

I expected to see a lot of cows roaming about, but so far, it has been all about goats.

Also in Fort Kochi, we took a cooking class, and learned to make a bunch of masalas and dishes that we can never hope to replicate. There were tons of fresh spices that we have only ever seen powdered in a jar.. we are currently staying outside of Alleppey at a bed an breakfast run by an older Indian couple. We are getting a taste of authentic Keralan life and food. Including a lot of beetroot, which is surprisingly delicious here in Kerala. You should have seen the fear in our eyes the first time someone brought out a pot of shredded beets for us to try.

In Fort Kochi, they still use old Chinese fishing nets to catch fish.

I wasn't kidding about the ducks.This is maybe one quarter of the pack.

We have travelled south from Mumbai to the state of Kerala, on the southwestern coast of India. Last night, we stayed on a houseboat and cruised the "backwaters," checking out life along the water and a lot of ducks.

Cricketers on a Friday afternoon in Mumbai. We have found India to be pretty refreshing so far, after the hassles of Egypt (everyone wants you to buy something from their store...to the point where they try to lure you in by saying "no touch!" -- so the fact that they will not touch you and pull you into their store is a selling point). We also found that we are no longer the main attraction for local photographers...we had lunch the other day at a table next to a Bollywood star. Everyone wanted their photo with her instead...we were a little hurt until we realized that she is a legit celebrity!

Ancient carvings inside the caves on Elephanta Island, about an hour by boat out in the Mumbai harbor.

India!

We made it to India! We landed in Mumbai after a redeye from Cairo/Amman, and set out to see the sights. Here's the Gateway to India, built to commemorate the first visit of a British king, and the building to the left is actually a hotel. Not ours!

Tomorrow we leave Egypt and head to India. Mumbia, then down south to Kerala...up to the desert to do a "camel safari" and on to Delhi. One last parting shot...foreign tourists are awesome and so plentiful. And to think...I was concerned about going out without a head scarf.

Egypt by night!

Reliefs like this cover (or once covered) the surfaces of the temples throughout the valley. To the left is the god Horus (I believe) -- the one with the falcoln head.

Scenes from the banks of the Nile.

Ram-headed guardians of the temple.

Scenes from "inside" the Karnak Temple, near Luxor.

On the rooftop deck of our Nile cruise boat. We sailed from Luxor to Aswan, stopping to visit temples along the way. It was a great way to see the Nile valley and the sights.

We also visited the Egyptian Museum yesterday, but were not allowed to take photos inside. It's probably for the best (for your sake) since we saw a ton of mummies in various stages of decay (cloths off!). Jeff asked me how much he would have to pay me to kiss one. It would be in the thousands for sure. The Museum was really impressive, unlike anything else we've seen. It has the contents of King Tut's tomb, which is the only tomb found intact in modern times.