Incapacitated in India....

Holy Cow...

I think I have a love-hate relationship with India and now we are happy and well in lovely, friendly, cosy Nepal I can reflect on our month in India with some fond memories. India is a crazy place. We arrived in Delhi on the 22nd April it almost felt like being born again into a strange new world where simple things such as crossing the road, booking train tickets, asking for directions become major adventures in themselves. I was in India 8 years ago and Nick has been to some pretty odd places on his over-land journey to Ghana, but arriving in Delhi was a major shock to the system.

Cows really do have right of way in India and wander aimlessly through the streets everywhere - even on the beaches in Goa (see above). One of the Hindu Gods (I forget the name) is believed to use the cow as a vehicle to be present on earth and for this reason eating beef is strictly forbidden, and people smear cow dung in the walls of their homes for purification!?!


At the Taj Mahal with our newly acquired friends!..

Posing Bollywood style!

Taj Mahal...

The Taj Mahal was as amazing as it looks in the pictures. However, what was more amazing was the amount of Indians who wanted our photograph. It felt like we were famous, some people even took our photo without asking first - paparazzi style it was hilarious and one guy even paid the 'professional' photographer for a photo taken of him with us - how weird!!???!

After spending a couple of hours at the Taj Mahal in the 42 degree heat I suddenly felt like my head was in a vice and then realised that I hadn't had a wee since Delhi - I was seriously dehydrated...

Ill again

This was the start of our collective illnesses - and we spend the rest of the next week holed up in a air-conditioned hotel in Jaipur, Rajhastan where we both had food poisoning and strangely enough, the flu (malaria-alarm bells were ringing but we are now fine touch wood).

We did at least manage one afternoon out of our sick bed and visited the City Palace in Jaipur (the pink city)....see below


with a Sadhu...


Paradise in Goa

So, after deciding that we couldn't hack the desert-like temperatures of Rajhastan, we headed straight to Goa via Mumbai. Here we spent an amazing 10 days relaxing by the really warm Arabian sea, eating gorgeous seafood and drinking beer - most of the rest of India is t-total and vegetarian so it was like heaven arriving in Goa!



Drinking beer from a teapot with our new friend Neal - a hilarious guy from Yorkshire who kept us entertained for 2 days in Benoulem. I have never met anyone more enthusiastic about food than me until I met him!!



Sad!

The beach at Palolem


The long road to Nepal...

From Goa, we started the long journey to Nepal via Varanasi. (Varanasi was an adventure in itself but I'll have to save that one until I get home). The journey was long (4 days), hot, tiring and made interesting by the strange people we met along the way including a young German boy who'd come to India on a short trip and become 'enlightened' and turned into a holy man - complete with Sadhu gear and stick! Strange what India does to some people....

Goodbye South Africa...

So, its been a long time since I last wrote. As I write this in Durban, our visa expires on Saturday so we have finally decided our next move and are flying out to India on Saturday! Really exciting to be experiencing a totally different culture - no more home comforts like bread and normal tea and bacon...its time to get down to some hard-core travelling business. However, its been a great 3 months in South Africa and I've learnt lots about the place, the people and the animals..

'dankie' for a 'lekker' time...

We left Stellenbosch on 3rd April having spent just over 2 months living and working there.

Ill really miss the beautiful buildings in the town, amazing scenery, our lovely flat, the friends I made whilst working in the pancake restaurant there and of course, the amazing Cape wines...

Here are are few photos of our time in Stellenbosch...

Chilling in the flat with my new top from the girls (must needed Topshop fix)

- THANKS RACHEL AND CHAR!!!! you are the best..


Nick (Dr Evil) with his beloved Frankie the dog (very very cute dog)

Hamman St - the street we lived on in Stellenbosch.


A hilarious night out for Nick's leaving drinks with his friends from work - Zanne and Margueritte (below)...




Cape Town weekend

We had a great weekend in Cape Town some time in March where we met up with Paula and Ian. Paula, for those who don't know is my friend and former boss at Wallis. She was in Cape Town shooting the Wallis summer 07 collection with her partner, Ian - we had a great fun and it was lovely to see familiar faces again...

We had a great evening at The Kraal on Long Street, eating traditional African food and watching the crazy Zulu dancers - see below!

De Soete Inval

Pancakes and all things sweet - working there has really made my sweet tooth bigger! I've got major cheese and carrot cake cravings everywhere we go now - its having an impact on my waistline, but I think we should all enjoy life's little pleasures and in Stellenbosch for me it was wine (the wine is amazing and very cheap) and cake...

Working for Anneke and Peter was great - they were fantastic bosses (are you reading this Anneke??!) and I loved being a waitress again. I love the human interaction with so many different people every day and the buzz you get after a busy shift....it reminds me of my sixth form days working at Brown's Bistro in Clitheroe with Charlotte, Anna, Kal, Holly and co...although here after a busy night there was no chips and gravy at the chinese chippy with the girls which I did miss dearly!!

Utlising my marketing skills!!?!

The customers were generally really nice and after 2 months I was sounding like a broken record as I got so much attention everytime I opened my mouth (which of course I loved)...'oh wow, where are you from? What you doing working in Stellenbosch? So, then I'd repeat the same story everyday, telling them what we were doing...I met loads of people from all around the world - Dutch, German, South African and of course Brits, in fact I even met a couple from Blackburn and a guy from Wigan!!! South Africans are really hospitable, I got so many offers to stay at people's houses on our travels...

Here I am at work with the gang...

I also inspired surprising reactions in some people...one guy loved my accent so much and asked me to read poetry to him - he said I sounded like....this makes me laugh....Helen Mirren!!??! He was being deadly serious. A little boy also told his mum I reminded him of the Queen of Narnia!!?! Not sure whether this is a complement or not - I am told she is a bit of a icey queen!

I worked with some great people - Mina and Wilma (my 'meiser')...Wilma taught me how to make Bobotie (v traditional dish) and Mina taught me some Afrikaans.

Then there was Bethuel, 'Master of cappucino foam making' and generally funny guy who taught me, well, how to make amazingly good milk froth!! Steven who didn't teach me much (sorry steven) as he was a bit of a workaholic - he was all the way from Malawi. And recently Quentin, who is studying to become a vicar/preacher.

Last but most certainly not least ...Antoinette (my best friend in Stellenbosch) - had lots of fun being silly together and having a few bevvies after work...and she taught me some great Afrikaans phrases like 'lekker slaap' (sleep well - 'like a slob') 'es is lief vir yau' (i love you), 'es is yammer' (I am sorry) and more the obvious words that I didn't need any help with were 'dankie' (thank you) and 'lekker' which Afrikaan speaking South Africans use in almost every sentence (it means great, cool, nice) - apparently its even in the South African English dictionary now - so we could well be saying it in England too. Here is Antoinette in the restaurant with Steven...

Road trip...

We said our goodbyes to Tina and guys at The Stumble Inn after spending our last night in a tent freezing with no covers (!) and left Stellenbosch on 3rd April on a road trip with Antoinette, her cousin - Estelle and Sunal headed across the Klein Karoo (desert-like area) to Oudhtshoorn. Here there was a huge Afrikaans music and culture festival happening. We stopped on the way at this really weird bar in the middle of the desert. The guy who owned it had the clever idea of calling it 'Ronnie's Sex Shop' - great marketing strategy as the place was heaving... There were bras and knickers hanging from the bar and all sorts - weird...




We were supposed to camp but when we arrived it was absolutely boiling hot and we ended up staying at Antoinettes parents (who had rented a holiday home there) in the lovely air-conditioned lounge. It was great fun - despite the fact we couldn't understand what the bands were singing about as everything was in Afrikaans. We drank lots of brandy and coke and ate Afrikaans food - lots of fun...




After saying our goodbyes to Antoinette and Sunal we left the next day to start our journey up the Garden Route. First stop, Wilderness - a great place and totally wild as the name suggests. We stayed right by the ocean and could hear the waves last thing at night and first thing in the morning. We walked to some waterfall one day ....






Meeting the animals...

From Wilderness, we managed to get a lift with a lovely couple of girls from New York who were working on a project in the townships of Cape Town. They took us all the way to Port Elizabeth where we visited Addo National Park and saw loads of animals - Elephants, Kudo, Warthog, - almost the whole cast of the Lion King! It was very exciting I loved the Warthogs ('when i was a young warthog..') and Zebras...




Coffee Bay

From Port Elizabeth we headed to Coffee Bay in the Transkei - a really traditional Zhosa area where people still live in the traditional Zhosa mud huts all brightly painted and dotted across the landscape....it almost reminded me of teletubbie land or the land of the Moomins! It was really good to feel like we were actually in Africa again as in SA it's sometimes easy to forget. The hostel was run by the local people which was really refreshing and they cooked us traditional Zhosa food there - a really idyllic spot...



From Coffee Bay we headed to Durban where we stayed for our final week in South Africa. We were heading here to meet a guy with a boat. Nick had put up ads in the yacht clubs in Durban and Cape Town advertising us as crew members and a guy had expressed interest in us joining him all the way to Australia...Although it sounded like a great idea and a chance to see some amazing islands, after meeting the guy and having a look at the boat I decided that I just couldn't spend three months in such a small space - and of course then theres the sick sickness, storms, lack of communication with the outside world etc...So, here's to India....

happy birthday to me, me, me.........!!!!

thursday 8 march 2007

27 today! Here I am opening my cards in the morning and eating my birthday carrot cake....'happy 27th to me!'.....




Nick booked for us to go on a wine tour - it was AMAZING! Here I am in the vineyards just outside Stellenbosch at our first wine estate - 'Simonsig' - you may have bought this wine in the super market before - we tried the champagne, and 6 other wines...Lucas, our guide made a huge fuss of me and by 10 AM sure enough I was more than a little bit tipsy...



This is us at Fairview, the second wine estate of the day. Here, the family who own the estate decided to use a play on words when naming their wines....Popular wines are 'Goats do Roam' and 'Bored Doe'....The French weren't very happy about this and tried to sue but the family won...the wine was great and the cheese tasting was even better!


After a traditional South African lunch we went to the third estate, tried 6 more wines, followed by an ice cream then we headed to the last estate (cant remember the names of the last two - funny that!?)....



Lining them up....look, nose, taste, swallow...

a little bit giddy...


So, we then went out in the evening for dinner, more champagne, cocktails with our new friends we'd met on the wine tour then Nick and I ended up in a REALLY cheesy nightclub called 'Cancune', where f0r some reason all the guys were in lycra cycling shorts...

All in all it was a great day...