Wednesday 23 November 2016

Namaste

My Princess Di pose on my Birthday at the Taj Mahal
Namaste to you all................. we're back and pleased to say we survived the delights of India! 

Wow what an adventure it was as well. Delhi had the worst smog it has had in 20 years, some of the currency got withdrawn overnight and Trump won the USA elections!! 

There are no words
It really can't be called a holiday - no holiday has you setting your alarm clock at 5a.m and not once but several times. No holiday has you regularly travelling for 12 hours to get from one place to another! But I wouldn't have missed one single minute of our journey for anything. 

We saw great extremes - poverty and opulence on one hand and dirt yet beauty on the other. 

Sleeping Tiger! 
We saw not one but 2 Tigers, the clouds cleared for us to see the beautiful Himalayas range, I had 3 birthday cakes - 4 if you include the fantastic one our team did for me, we also saw;  queues of people at banks and ATM's when the currency was removed overnight, a dead body being taken for cremation (along the street on a stretcher type thing with the face open to the world!!), more than 5 people on scooters, a container truck held together with inner tubes, Cows and Goats walking across highways, dogs dying, children amused (and curious) at seeing white faces, Gandhi's resting place, huge birds of prey, crocodiles and much, much more. 

We also encountered great kindnesses with massive smiles from everyone - that is when weren't being stared at as many people have never seen white europeans.  We got asked loads of times for photos with them to show their friends and relatives back home.......... I felt like the Queen or a pop star! 

The Himalayas
If you fancy this sort of trip then I highly recommend www.rivieratravel.co.uk
 and try to make sure that Tony Russo is the guide - he kept us safe and well ensuring that we knew what to buy where, use the hand sanitiser at all times and had a fiery Italian personality that seemed to work well with laid back Indians. The whole trip was really well organised and we covered a lot of ground and saw a lot of India in a short time - the hotels were also exceptionally good! Many people were on their 3rd or 4th trip so they must be doing something right! 

Along sideTony we had fantastic local guides Parol and Sanjay - amazing people who made the trip completely come alive. Particularly Sanjay who when the altitude affected my asthma ensured I missed nothing - particularly the Himalayas. 

We ate great food - not just curries but a wide assortment of cuisines from across the globe and there were no places where cooking something different from was a chore. 

We had a group of great people, Annie, Dawn, Phil, Debs, Mary and the 'Baron' amongst many will live on in my memory for a long time!!! For all the right reasons too..........

BUT, it has taken the best part of a 4 days to recover from all the travel - so if you decide to do this amazing journey get into training for it at an early stage!!

Back then to the UK in the throws of some dreadful rain and storms and a team who thought it fun to give me a Skydiving birthday present - thankfully it was a send up and instead I have a gift of Dinner at Gordon Ramseys 3 star Michelin restaurant in Chelsea, London.

So, it's now heads down and on to Christmas with decorations soon to be let out of their boxes, trees to be erected, the inevitable Christmas shopping (next week - Exeter) and the joy (!) of Christmas card writing!! 

The Vic is actually quite busy for this time of year and the team did an amazing job of looking after her in our absence - Thank you all, you can do it all again in January!! 

Till the next instalment,  

Much love, 

Liz xxx