Never Coming Back

Again, updating has slowed down, we're just too busy! But hopefully I can fill you in on what's keeping us for the past couple weeks. October here is similar to our November/December season back home. As I mentioned before all the houses put lights up and there are sales in all the shops. The first half of October is the puja season (when we had our two week vacation). Then for the week of October 28 there is a festival called Diwali, or the festival of lights. This means that any person who doesn't have lights up on their house yet will put them up and that all of the stores also decorate their doors and walls. For Diwali we were invited over to a friend's house for a party and fireworks. We took a rickshaw over and on the way we picked up some hot food off the street (jalebi and pakora). Everybody was out on the streets, fireworks were going off everywhere. Before I get further let me remind you that we are in Delhi, the national capital. It is densely populated, wit...

Delhi

Andrew woke up lazy, but I wanted to go out. So I looked up a small monastery near Pelling, about 45 minutes walk away. I asked the hotel manager if it was close, and she said it was a nice walk. So I headed out. It turned out to be a pleasant walk, there was actually a soccer field on the trail with kids playing and strangely enough a helipad. The road split and I asked a man walking by which way to the monastery and he said "always take the rough road". It sounded like some sort of proverb, but as the road split three more times I always took the rough road and it turned out to be good advice as it was the path to the monastery. Most of the walk was level but the monastery is at the top of a big hill that there are switchbacks up. As I was walking up there were lots of other families walking up, it was nice to see a different sort of Indian tourist than what I find in Delhi or the other big cities. At the top I found that the monastery was actually closed, but I walked aro...

We woke up at around 8 and packed some day packs for our hike to Kacheperri Lake. We left most of our luggage at the hotel, and had a small breakfast of porridge and eggs. Kacheperri Lake is a high altitude lake about 20 km from Pelling. It is sacred to both Buddhists and Hindus, so the small lake is surrounded by monasteries and a small temple. There is a small trail that takes you most of the way, and then you have to walk along the road. We walked down the road to where the trail started and headed out. It was a lot of fun to just walk through the woods. The first part of the trail was on the shaded part of the hill, so it was wet and slippery and quite steep. But eventually it leveled off and was a lot easier. There were a lot of little streams that had to be cross on small foot bridges that mainly were logs placed over rocks. It was by no means isolated. Off of the trail there were many small farmers' huts and fields of corn and grains. It was pretty cool to see such a differ...