{"id":121,"date":"2006-12-12T02:05:41","date_gmt":"2006-12-12T07:05:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sethandclaire.com\/?p=121"},"modified":"2006-12-12T05:13:58","modified_gmt":"2006-12-12T10:13:58","slug":"from-the-city-to-the-country-to-the-city","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/sethandclaire.com\/?p=121","title":{"rendered":"From the city to the country to the city"},"content":{"rendered":"

So we left Varanasi, feeling good that we could still find our way around an Indian city and have fun (and we felt that much holier), and traveled back to the countryside.<\/p>\n

An overnight train journey took us to Gwalior where we saw a fort at hyper-speed and were back on the train for Orcha in only 4 hours – and that included\u00a0lunch!\u00a0 Needless to say the Gwalior fort wasn’t all that great, mostly due to the screaming hordes of school children that were on a field trip to see the fort and the tourists within.<\/p>\n

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Orcha is a 16km tempo-ride (sort of a shared rickshaw) from the train station and we were lucky enough to share it with a fat, happy, bean eating and bean throwing Indian lady!\u00a0 She made our day forcing us to eat copious amounts of peas and throw the husks at the other tempos!<\/p>\n

Orcha was great.\u00a0 After doing our laundry in the morning (a surprisingly gratifying activity) we visited the fort, went swimming in the river – skinny dipping actually – and then went to the old temple.\u00a0 We are generally forted and templed out, but the ones in this town were so unpresumptious that we could help but to love them.\u00a0 And the thing that really made our day was having a swimming-hole just outside of town all to ourselves, to lay in the sun and read.\u00a0 No staring.\u00a0 No conversations.\u00a0 It was heaven!<\/p>\n

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The next day our whirlwind schedule took us to Agra.\u00a0 This trip was one of our more ‘interesting’.\u00a0 First off, we happened to share a sleeper compartment with the prince of a grand old estate and as we went deeper into conversation we discovered that this French student in Delhi had his own Lamborgini, houses and cars in Australia, Mumbai, and all over the world, as well as a plethora of servants.\u00a0 Needless to say we got his number in Dehli and secured (hopefully) a place to stay with a train station pickup in a Lamborgini.<\/p>\n

This distraction from the outside world caused us to miss our stop and travel an extra 45 min and 60 km past Agra.\u00a0 Oops!\u00a0 Thankfully, general tickets were available to get us back, giving Claire a luggage rack seat in the crammed open seating compartment.\u00a0 For those of you who don’t know what “general ticket” means in India, it gets you a ride on one of 4 cars that contain 90% of the people on any given train.\u00a0 Cheep and always available, it was our only option, and we were just lucky to be able to get on (and off) at the right times.<\/p>\n

When we got to Agra, we took a rickshaw to our hotel, only to find out that they had given our room away.\u00a0 Apparently reservations are good for a 2 hour window!\u00a0 Luckily we ended up at a nice place with a view of the Taj Mahal, and a room with 2<\/strong> double beds and a gymnasium\u00a0sized floor.\u00a0 So much space is something we haven’t experienced for awhile in this highly populated country!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

So we left Varanasi, feeling good that we could still find our way around an Indian city and have fun (and we felt that much holier), and traveled back to the countryside. An overnight train journey took us to Gwalior where we saw a fort at hyper-speed and were back on the train for Orcha […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-121","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/sethandclaire.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/121","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/sethandclaire.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/sethandclaire.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/sethandclaire.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/sethandclaire.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=121"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/sethandclaire.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/121\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/sethandclaire.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=121"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/sethandclaire.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=121"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/sethandclaire.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=121"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}