Jonas has left me! After bursting into tears when she got into a rickshaw and disappeared into the smoggy night, I have been non-stop busy looking at apartments all day yesterday, and with my first day of work today, so it wasn't until dinner yesterday that I even got a chance to sit down and reflect on what it will mean to be here sola.
But first, the last two weeks, which we have been remiss in documenting!
We were in Shimla for days, pondering our next move and resting weary bones (and stomachs), but the hard rain kept a-fallin'. The roads up in Himachal Pradesh (the mountains) were pretty dubious seeming with the monsoon hitting hard, and after a few articles describing bus accidents in the region, Tanq and I decided to reroute southward.
The next trial in transit was lack of a guide. You see, in our quest for the smallest backpacks this side of Lonely Planet, we cut up our books, carrying only the paper-clipped sections we'd planned to travel to. And since we had planned to stay in Himachal for the duration of the trip, the Rajasthan chapter was sitting in the bottom of a suitcase in the back of a Pratham office closet in Delhi! But we couldn't let this stop us, of course, so Rajasthan, ho! Off we went.
As luck would have it, we spotted two Chinese college girls just as we stepped off the train in Jaipur, and so we adopted them as our traveling partners for the following 1-2 days. Saw some sites, shopped some shops, the usual.
Next, to Udaipur on an overnight train, in which Jonas got trampled by at least thirty people, climbing past her to get out of the train as it stopped at various stations all through the hot Rajasthani night. We arrived in Udaipur at 6am, so we went straight to the river-side cafe of our hostel, where we met 2 other travelers- Jimmy, a Chinese guy with literally perfect English, and James, a British med school student who had traveled all over the place. We spent the next 2 days hanging with them, being very diligent tourists: the first day, we saw two temples, the City Palace, James Bond Octopussy (which was filmed in Udaipur), AND a culture and dance show! Impressive. We know. The next day, we did some final shopping and took a boat ride around Lake Pichola, then boarded our final overnight train back to Delhi.
The past few days have been filled with apartment shopping and other errands. We had a victory over the scam artists of Delhi's rickshaw system, in which the rickshaw-walla (as usual), claimed that his meter no longer worked. We bargained a price, got into the rickshaw, and figured out that the darn thing worked perfectly fine-- so needless to say, we caused the maximum stir upon arrival at our destination to guilt the rascal into admitting his LIES and TRICKERY and allowing us to pay the proper price!
And now, what you've all been waiting for... PICTURES!!!!
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