Apart from the rat in the roof above our bed and the flooding on the floor of our room (!!), I genuinely enjoyed our two weeks of Workaway volunteering in the Yelagiri Hills of Tamil Nadu. Chris has already shared some videos of our experiences so I won’t add anything else (check them out), other than to reflect that for me it was a real positive reinforcement of my own personal marketing and business management / mentoring skills and the value I can bring to other people. Having spent most of my life as an ‘employee’ (sometimes with very limited feedback about whether I was any good or not) getting the chance to do some contracting work before we left Christchurch was a real confidence-build for me and the Workaway further added a touch of reinforcement that I do actually have some good skills that add value to others.
While we’re still happy in traveller mode, I do occasionally ponder if it is possible to create a lifestyle that combines our love of our Christchurch ‘home’ base, an ability to visit family in the UK and our love of travel and adventuring! This certainly isn’t something I am actively pursuing at the moment, but I am allowing a little ponder once in a while. I’m also not naive in that this sort of lifestyle is also not without its challenges as well as the opportunities it might bring. But hey - life’s an adventure and sometimes doors have opened that I didn’t even know existed in the first place!
After Yelagiri we headed up to another hill station - Ooty - arriving via a 5 hour ’toy train’ which was ratcheted up the hill. The Brits used to escape the heat of the plains by coming up here to wander around botanic gardens, play golf and drink tea! Not much of the genteel days are left as the town has been built out and it’s now a big holiday destination for Indian tourists and honeymooners! It was actually chilly enough at night that the puffer/duvet jackets came out! We even looked a bit 'his and hers' with our matching jackets, Icebreaker tops, trousers and trainers!!
We explored the surrounding hills, hitchhiked a lift with a group of students (and chaperones), discovered that carrots were the gift of choice for the school kids, had many more selfies and visited a tea factory where we supped ‘white tea.’ This is the most exclusive and expensive tea in the world, made from only 3 baby tea leaves plucked from the top of the tea plant. My taste buds clearly aren’t that refined as I found it a bit tasteless, but at least now I can say I have drunk the most expensive tea in the world, as well as the most expensive coffee which we had in Bali a few years ago. Coffee Lawak is made when a cat-like animal eats the coffee bean and then poos it out ready for roasting…. Apparently their digestion of the bean changes the taste. I didn’t think much of that coffee either!! For some reason the tea factory also did a roaring trade in chocolate, so we bought some of that instead of tea!!
A fabulous journey (on a 'sleeper bus') through a national park to the royal city of Mysore - saw deer, boar and elephants, while we travelled alongside the remnants of a forest fire.
Travelling to Mysore has brought us to our third Indian state - Karnataka - and therefore our third language!! How pleased am I that English is so widely spoken as learning new words every few days is confusing. Hindu is not as widely spoken in the southern states as up north and each state is very proud of their culture and sites.
Mysore is also known as Mysuru - how confusing for so many of the places we visit to have two names!! One app or website might use the old name and another will use the new one! Even the locals don’t seem to be that consistent! I believe the name changes are the Indians actually reclaiming their own heritage, rather than using the names the British Empire gave them….much the same as the Welsh and Maori have sought to rename their place names, so it is a good thing.... just a tad confusing!
The walk from the railway station to our hotel was roasting (we’ve hit the high 30s now) with the most scrummy aromas of spices and fruit. Mysore is apparently the “third cleanest” city in the whole country.
India's rubbish and dirt....that is the topic for a whole blog or vlog.
Mysore has a proud tradition of is a royal city with a fantastic Royal Palace. It was only finished in 1912 and is not a ruin, but one that has been beautifully kept for visitors to marvel at (after running barefoot from the shoe drop-off around to the tourist entry in blistering heat!) In fact the current royal family still live there. I love the fact that the citizens of Mysore are still royalists despite what they have been told to believe! The British rule certainly did away with a number of royal families and India officially disbanded the royal leaders of their states away with them in 1971. When the last king of Mysore died without naming a successor the citizens worried that this was the end of their royal family. His widow consulted widely with advisors and then agreed the new king (a nephew) and his coronation was in 2015, so the royals live on! Royal gossip....the birth of the king's son in 2017 was seen as a sign that the 'curse' of the royal family was over. After trying to run away with the royal jewels when her husband was disposed, the wife of a previous king (we're talking 1600s) put the curse on the family that they would never have a natural born heir.
I also accidentally bought a rather large amount of Mysore Pak... this is a famous sweet which used to be made for the royals and now for everyone. It's made of sugar and ghee (animal fat) - which I only discovered afterwards! After a couple of very sweet tasters I gave most of it to the hotel staff before it melted all over our room!!
We visited the Sand Museum - impressive what you can do with sand!! Isn't Christchurch supposed to be having a 'sandcastle competition'?!
I did a couple of yoga classes. I turned up to the first one thinking I’d be joining others for a class, but I was the only one there so proceeded to have a one on one sweating workout. I am soooooo stiff! I wasn’t that flexible before I left NZ, but boy have I seized up in the last few weeks and this meant an achy body for the next few days.
Anyone who knows me and Chris know we can’t go past a water-park without a visit, so we spent a day as the only Westerners there at the extortionate amount of #GBP 7 / $14!!! No-one wore swimming costumes - the least people wore (including us) were shorts and t-shirt; some of the women were in full sari or Shalwar Kameez, including their flowing scarves! The place was so quiet we couldn’t go on one of the rides which needed 4 people until Chris went and pleaded with some people to come up with us. We eventually managed one go on this ride and then it got shut for lunch!! On a couple of slides we had to wait for them to put the water on before we could go down! No queues meant no waiting meant much fun and more achy bodies the next day!
This week we’ve just been chilling out in Hampi - a fantastic location in the South Indian state of Karnataka. It’s a feast for the eyes with a red landscape scattered with literally thousands and thousands of huge granite boulders, punctuated with lush green rice paddy fields and banana plantations. This is India’s bouldering (climbing) capital which also cradles a sprawling UNESCO World Heritage Site - the old capital of the Vijayanagara Empire which ruled South India from the 14th to 17th Centuries.
It’s been the first place since Varkala (the Keralan beachside resort we visited a month ago) where we could just ‘be’. Travelling in India is fun, interesting and surprising. We learn something new every day we - from how to navigate the travel system, to what we are eating, or the history or culture of the place we are visiting.
Along with these new experiences every day, walking and exploring for miles and negotiating for tuk tuks, fruit or just crossing the road we sometimes just want some time out to recharge. Sitting in a cafe and chilling out isn’t something ‘local’ Indian eateries offer, so retreating once in a while to the ‘backpacker’ scene has given us a chance to decompress, eat and drink something other than rice, roti or “curry” and easily get a black coffee with no sugar!
Apologies...that is a bit of a pathetic moan from people who are "living the dream"...please excuse me, I do not expect sympathy!!
Chris has been bouldering and I’ve been to yoga….both of us have been complaining of aches and stiffness like a couple of old people! There's plenty of boulders behind our backpackers and it’s a fab place to watch sunset.
Yesterday we walked for nearly 14km in 40 degree heat through Hampi’s old city with temples, palaces, elephant stables and water towers. We walked up one hill to a temple at the top and got the most stunning views which showed boulders and ruins in all directions and going on for miles. We were both absolutely shattered afterwards, but this was an amazing day and one we’d totally recommend for anyone heading to India. It really is right up there with the world’s best known sites, such as Machu Picchu, Bagan and Angkor Wat…. But I had never heard of it until a few weeks ago!
We’re shortly heading up to the north before spending a week in Bhutan. We really didn’t have much of a plan of how to get there after Hampi…should we go left or right?! Given Bhutan and Darjeeling are still getting -1 to -3 degrees overnight we have decided to get one last blast of awesome weather by the beach before we hit Europe and head to Goa! We got engaged in Goa 17 years ago, so it has a special place in our minds. We will continue to ignore the young backpackers who were only just born at that stage and make us ask “was it really that long ago?”!!
