Greetings from Orchha, conceivably the only internet connection this week, and hardly a good one. It took 15 minutes just to get to this page! So I'll keep this brief, in case the connection dies.
I'm having a fantastic time. Not only is India a land of wonders, but I'm having to revise my prejudices about organized tours. This one, planned by a company (Melbourne-based!) called Intrepid, seems to have been put together by a master of dramatic timing and contrast. We see such wonderfully contrasting things that we are constantly overcome by delight, at least I am. After Agra's deservedly famous Fort (a dream) and the Taj (bigger than I could ever have imagined but less ornate) we traveled by train and jeep to a little city - once rich and influential - called Chanderi, stopping along the way for chai at a tiny village, at the rim of a vast silver lake (dam-formed and punctuated in places by the spires of an inundated castle), and in the fort up above our town just as the sun was setting... Next day we walked through the town (including a visit to a school where the kids sang the national anthem, very solemn, some with their eyes closed, each in his/her own key), then had a picnic on a lake, admired some 13th century Jain statues carved in a cliff face, bounced along awful roads to a desolate bend in a river where some ancient rock carvings - at least 10,000 yers old, perhaps several times that - have only recently been discovered, then back to our primitive hotel... Today we traveled to Orchha by local bus, a pretty intense experience as people piled and crammed in (one of my tourmates calculated that there were at least 100 people in the bus, not counting those on top), then by open vans through the huge monument-overshadowed Orchha to a resort where we're sleeping in air-conditioned tents fit for a king - our best accommodation of the trip after, perhaps (one can always hope) the worst. Not for the faint of heart, this kind of touring which tries to maximize contact with local people and avoid tourist comforts, but what a fantastic way to discover a place!
Another day in Orchha tomorrow, then the famous erotic carvings at Kajuraho, a national park, and then three pilgrimage sites: a relatively uknown one first, Chitrakoot; the most famous of all last, Varanasi; and in the middle a place which only draws pilgrims every 12 years - Allahabad. But this is one of those years. There may be 5 million pilgrims there when we are! Pray for us.
