Woooww 4 months India and still alive!!!

Yesssssssssss peoplessssss!

As most of you might know (ofcourse you do:)) I'm back in the Netherlands:) This is tha story of my last month in India.

At the second of Januari I left Jaipur by train. After a 19 hour during train trip I arrived in Mumbai the next day. Accidentally I found myself celebrating my birthday in this city. In a way too expensive stupid hotel. All by myself. No, that's not true, I shared my room with some lovely cute cockroaches. Well after all I was in Mumbai, with about 17 billions people the biggest city of India. The next day I decided that I wanted to leave that city, so I took a bus to Goa. I think that it took about 18 hours to get there. I didn't prepare myself, pretty stupid (ohhh I'm so adventurous :lol: ), so I was very happy that I met a nice hippy in the bus. Because I didn't know what to do or where to gett of I decided to suck up with him and with succes because he was okay with it if i would join him to his beachhut. He just came from Amsterdam, but originally he was from Israel. So many Israeli people in Goa wow.

We shared a riksja together and spent some hours chilling at the beach in front of his beachhut. Anyhow, in the end I decided that it had been long enough and I walked over the beach to another place, Arambol. Here I spent the rest of the morning with looking for a place to stay. Finally I found a nice beach hut made of palmleaves. I stayed there for a while. Quickly I found out that Arambol is known for all the (old) hippies and that turned out to be sooo true. There were hippieparties with hippie people doing hippie things. Although it was realy relaxing and I liked the hippiemusic there, I was looking forward to go to a more down to earth place (seriously, I think I'm too level-headed -and too cool ofcourse 8)-for most of the hippie crap).

So after some days I met with another intern from Jaipur, who was also travelling in Goa. Together we spent some time in the small city Margao. After this it was beachtime again, and we took a train to Gokarna located in the state south of Goa. This was a realy chilled out place, with no so many tourists. All the time it was really hot, so it was really nice to sssssssswim (although between 12 and 3pm it was almost too hot to be outside). Before I finally decided to buy some new suncream, I got sunburnt uhh 5 times? Haha too bad! You could contact the local fishermen and ask them to bring you to some more remote beaches, with names as Paradise beach and Halfmoon beach. Sooo cool :D

Then we went back to Goa, to another beach, named Palolem, with was also realy nice. Although it was possible to see dolphins from the beach, we also went on a dolphin spotting trip, just the two of us and two fishermen in a small boat. We went during sunset, and we saw jumping dolphins in front of the setting sun, which remined me on the poster that I used to have in my bedroom when I was like uhh 10? Haha! :)

We spent about one week together and after this we went back to Jaipur. She went by plain, but because I'm not thaaaaat rich anymore (understatement) I went by bus and train again. It took me about 2 days to get back and her like 5 hours or so hahaaa! In Mumbai I had to wait for about ten hours, which is realy a long time for doing nothing (although I'm realy trained now, because of India haha). I did some sightseeing and this time I liked the city much better than on my birthday. I thoiught that a visit to the Aquarium, the beach, the boulevard, the gateway of India, the cathedral, the Taj Mahal hotel and the museum of modern art would be enough to kill the time, but for some reason it only took me about 4 hours haha, oh I'm so faaaast 8) After I finally got back in Jaipur I spent some days with doing uhhh not that much:)

I decided that I really wanted to go to the Himalayas before I would leave India. Most of the Jaipur people told me that I was crazy, if I asked them if they were braaaaaaaaaave enough to join me to the Himalaya in Januari. “Well, than I will go by myself”, I thought and went to an internetcafe in order to gain more information about all the places in the Himalaya. When I got there I saw an email of another girl, who was looking for a travelmate for that week to the Himalaya. Such a coincidense, isn't it:) Soooooo I contacted her and it was realllyyyy nice:D We went to the planned city Chandigarh, the old summer residence of the Enghlish people Shimla, and to Manali. Manali is surrounded by realy high mountains and there was a lot of snow. We went for snowboarding there 8), which was reaaaaaaaaaally cool, although it was my first time, but ofcourse I turned out to be a natural talent, so I think that I'm ready for the Mount Everest now :lol: Heheeee uhhhh well at least we had a lot of fun:) Oh and one evening we went to a restaurant, but it was soooo cold inside that we decided to go to another restaurant and i opened the door and entered the place when I heared someone calling my name. I was like "Huhhhh", turned out that my former housemate was there as well! Ooh it's a small world afterall. I had the same in Mumbai where I ran into 4 other Jaipur interns, in that big city, haha, we had breakfast at McDonalds together, isn't it nice??? :lol:

Yeahh and about the climate. Yesss i have to admit that it was really cold, especially in Shimla and Manali, because they didn't have heating, so strange!!! So inside it was as cold as outside, also in the hotels and restaurants, whichs means that I had to wear about all my clothes to survive haha (actually I only had summerclothes with me, which might sounds stupid, but heyyy I didn't expect it to freeze in India, when I letf in October). Fortunaltely I had a lot of shawls with me and we also bought some other realy warm things (hats, gloves etc.). Another problem was that is was sooo cold that the waterworks froze, so we didn't have water for most of the time and if we had we almost frozeeeeeeeeeeee when we took a shower.

After Manali we left for Dharamsala, a girl that I met in Jaipur moved to this place and we realy wanted to visit her. Dharamsala is the residence of the Dalai Lama. The girl we visited works there with Tibetan refugees. We had the oppurtinity to help her one afternoon. Most of the refugees are Boedhistic monks, there where a lot of monks in that place. We attented a conversation class for thos refugees. We had to split up in small groups and that we we were expected to talk to the refugees. In my group were 3 Tibetans (age 25-28 ) and I was happy that we went to the Tibetan museum that morning, because I didn't know that much about the Tibetan problems, so that I was able to prevent myself from asking too stupid questions. Although my first question was: “so where are you guys from?” Hahaaa it is a TIBETAN refugees school :p . But the converstaion was realy interesting, they talked about their escape from Tibet (“We had to walk though the Himalayas for a month) and about the situation in Tibet. It was kind of an eye opener for me, because I didn't realise that the situation there was still so bad (torturing and police listen in to telephone conversations when the monks try to call home). After this intersting afternoon our time in the Himalaya had come to an end and we had to go back to Delhi, because my plane was leaving from there the next day. We went by bus, which had a 2 hour delay. At first the battery of the bus was dead (gosh so stupidddddd) and when we ffffffffffffinally started driving we stopped again after half an hour and people started to transfer fuel from a broken bus to our vehicle. It took about uhh I don't know, an hour?? In each case we were lik Grrrrrr. Fortunately we arrived in Delhi the next morning, after a very uncomfortable busride. We said goodbye to eachother and I took a riksja to the airport where I found out that my flight was delayed with 2 hours, so I had to wait from 8am till 4pm wich was pretty (verrryyy) boring and it made me miss my flight in London, where I had to sleep in the terminal for another night (no hotel stupid people). So in the end I had a 12 hour delay but after all this I arrived in the Netherlands where my parents picked me up. Ohhh and in the evening my friends organised kind of a surprise party wich was really nice of them and their food was delicious, thnx again guyss! And then it was Carnivallllll oh sooo nice! And now I have to look for a job....


So that was India....wonder which country will be next;)
Thanx for reading and your comments!

I had a lot of troubles with my laptop (ohhhh it officiely died now:((( at the moment they are trying to make a back up of my (and yours Jana!) India pics, hopefully it will work. My camera broke as well:( I got it repaired in Jaipur for fokking 2200 roepies! But it broke again, so now there are stripes over all my last pics:(, oh and I lost a memory card:( hahaa tragediessss, ohh well it will stay in my hart 4evah hehe that sounds lame:p okay endd ENDDD