Photo Gallery of Abby in Indian Places (just in case you miss my face :P)

Me and a friend (Natalie) in front of Jaisalmer Fort

Me sitting by a cannon on the wall of Jaisalmer Fort

Me on a camel

Me beside a camel

Me in front of a camel

Me with dessert hair at our dessert camp

Me in Front of a jain temple

Me on the top of Johdpur Fort overlooking the Blue City

Me on a fancy hotel island in the middle of the lake in Udaipur

Dessert Journeys

Note: I am using this blog post as my journal for this week of travelling (because I am getting lazy about journaling about everything). So I’m sorry for the excessive detail. If you want a quicker update check out my “Photo Gallery of Abby Standing in Front of Indian Places” instead.

After one week of classes in Jaipur we headed back on the road for some more travelling. We visited 3 different cities and spent one night sleeping in tents in the dessert. I saw a lifetimes worth of forts, palaces, beautiful buildings, and picturesque man-made lakes.

Jaisalmer:

A boy playing cricket inside Jaisalmer Fort

The most striking feature was the giant fort that covers a large hill. It reminded me of old hill cities in Europe. Many locals still lived inside the fort and it was also full of temples and shops catering to tourists. It was easy to spend hours just wandering around inside the fort and trying to not let the shop keepers “help us spend our money” as they would say. The shopping in Jaisalmer was amazing. It was difficult to not get drawn in to spending hours looking at beautiful fabrics, embroidery and silver jewellery. My favourite purchase was a silver pendent with the elephant God Ganesh and other scenes from India carved into it. I bought it from a cheerful Indian man who served us hot chai and showed us cases of other unique silver jewellery that his family had carved. Whenever I did tear my eyes away from the bedspreads and scarves though I was always impressed at how beautiful the city itself was. The whole fort and many of the buildings around it were intricately carved out of a beautiful warm stone that seemed to glow a pale orange in the late afternoon light.

I spent one wonderful afternoon down by the manmade lake. We peddled a peddle-boat around the buildings and temples in the middle of the lake. Afterwards a very talented tour guide included us in his French tour of the nearby folklore museum. I finally learned what some of the mustaches in India mean (almost every man here has a mustache, it’s like continual movember). Traditionally, in this area of India at least, a mustache that curls upwards is worn only by the Rajputs (the warrior caste) and the Brahmins (the educated or priestly caste) have straight mustaches that join their beards.

Dessert Safari:

This is one part of the trip that I was looking forward to most since I first got into the India semester. It didn’t let me down at all! We drove out into the dessert through a wind storm. Sand was blowing so hard when we got out of the bus that I had to wear a scarf around my face and tucked into my sunglasses just to keep the sand off. Even with this precaution I was still picking sand out of my eyes, mouth and hair for days afterwards. I had a local guide leading my camel and often he had to lean into the wind just to stop from being blown over. The dessert was beautiful and I felt like I was inside a national Geographic article every time I looked around myself. The camel ride itself was more comfortable than I was expecting, except for the short “camel race” I went on when I thought I was going to fly right off of the camel and off into the dunes.

Camels are one of the funniest looking animals I think I have ever seen. Each camels face has a different personality and their legs move so weird! The wind was blowing so hard that I kept getting unidentifiable camel liquids blown back onto my feet. Haha, It’s a small price to pay for having them lug me around I guess.

We spent the night sleeping in the dessert in big canvas tents that made me feel like I was in the army or on an old-time British adventure. They were surprisingly comfortable once we brushed the sand off of our pillows and sheets. That night was too windy for a bonfire but we still got to see some traditional music and dance and we stayed up late snuggling under the dessert stars (dessert stars look the same as every other kind of stares - just in case you were wondering).

Jodhpur:

View of Jodhpur (the Blue City) from the top of the fort

We only had one night here but we still managed to see a lot. The fort in Jodhpur is amazing! I have seen a fair amount of castles and forts in my day but this one put them all to shame. The castle it reminded me of the most was Edinburgh cast in Scotland (I’m pretty sure Edinburgh castle is the one JK Rowling based Hogwarts off of). It was towering up on a hill above the city like Edinburgh castle, with the walls so close to the sheer cliff edge that it looks like it is an extension of the cliff itself. But  if Edinburgh castle is an elegant war horse, then Jodhpur fort is a massive and beautifully decorated oliphaunt, and it would crush the Edinburgh war horse with one tusk (sorry Katie). Haha, I guess stuff in India just has to be bigger when the walls need to defend against charging war elephants. The city of Jodhpur is beautiful as well and most of the houses are painted blue, giving it the name the Blue City. I did my course selection on top of the fort and then we walked down into the city. We passed residential neighbourhoods were there were courtyards that seemed  to be used as cow” fields” and groups of old ladies gossiping out on their front steps. Then we wandered through the market streets and got lost in the shopping area looking for a place to eat. Even after being in India for so long I still find that an hour or so of wandering around a crowded Indian city street is an overwhelming and exhausting experience (probably the equivalent of wandering around Toronto for a whole day).

Inside Johdpur Fort

Udaipur:

Udaipur is famous for its Lake. It is a beautiful city and we spent lots of time soaking up the lake views. The palace here was also amazing and we had a funny guide who spoke excellent English. My favourite part was the manikin of a famous warhorse that had a cloth elephant’s trunk connected to its face. Apparently the Rajput armies used to dress their horses up this way to defend them from the elephants of the Moghul armies that would fight with swords in their trunks. The story goes, that if the horses were disguised with elephant trunks then the war elephants would mistake them to be elephant babies and not attack them.

Udaipur felt much more like a European city than an Indian city. The rooftop restaurants and white washed patios reminded me of Greece. There are some very fancy hotels in Udaipur as well, including one that was featured in the James Bond film Octopussy and used to be a summer palace in the center of the lake.

While we were in Udaipur we got to see a little bit of the colour festival called Holi. As part of this festival social boundaries are relaxed and people throw multi-coloured paint on each other. We had to stay in the hotel for most of the festival to avoid dangerous situations and unwanted grabbing (white tourists and especially women can sometimes be targeted), but we did get to go out afterwards and see lots of people covered head to foot in dye. Everyone was extra friendly and wishing us happy Holi wherever we went. There were still some people out with dye and water balloons but the worst I got was some little boys shooting water guns at me. The night before was more exciting. On this night people light up fires of straw in the streets and set off fire crackers. It was a little scary to push our way through crowds of people and fires to find our way to the main road to pick up a rickshaw back to our hotel. There were people celebrating everywhere and loud western pop music blaring. The craziest part was when we had to cut across the main square. In order to get past the mob of onlookers we had to walk so close to a giant bonfire that I felt the heat on my face and just kept hoping that a fire cracker was not going to explode at me.

A straw bundle about to be lit on fire

"Holy Cow!"... I mean cow that got Holied (covered in colour)

Hampi and Hyderabad

I have had two amazing weekend trips this past month. One was to the ancient city of Hampi where there is a cute little modern touristy town that has grown up around the ancient temples. The other was to Hyderabad, about as opposite of a place that you can get in India.

Hampi

This was the highlight of my trip so far since visiting the rainforest. It is the ruined remains of the great temple city of the southern Hindi empire that was sacked by the Muslim invaders about 500 years ago. The ruins lay covered by jungle for hundreds of years until the British came to India and rediscovered them. The ruins cover kilometers of area and there is no way to see them all over the course of a short stay. We did get to see some of the highlights though like a giant statue of Ganesh (the elephant headed God), the elephant stables where the royal elephants were dressed, the Vishnu temple full of rows and rows of musical pillars that would have been hit by sticks to make music (blue man group style), and the Lotus Mahal where the queens and the king could relax in their pleasure garden with refreshing water being sprayed onto them.

We spent one very hot day exploring the ruins but the highlight of my trip to Hampi was the adventure a small group of us went on to watch the sunrise from the top of a nearby mountain. We left the hotel at 5:30 in the morning and walked through the town in the dark. There were a surprising amount of people already awake and working, although there were also many people still sleeping outside in beds beside the road. We didn’t really know where we were going but were lucky enough to run into a friendly Indian man who sells fresh chai tea at the top of the mountain every morning. He showed us a route up the side of the mountain where we had to walk up steep steps carved into the smooth rock with the side of the cliff hidden in darkness right beside us. When we reached the top the view was breathtaking and we watched the sun slowly rise out of the mist with a small group of other tourists. We all sat on the roof of an ancient temple and looked down at the mountains, jungle and ruins bellow us. We were also joined by a group of curious monkeys who climbed all around us and stole our plastic chai tea cups to chew on. They were adorable but also a little bit frightening, especially when they came at you to try to steel something. One even jumped on Sam’s backpack to try to get his water bottle.

Monkeys trying to get the last of the chai out of our plastic cups

The whole landscape around Hampi looks like something right out of Indiana Jones or Jerasic Park. There are smooth boulders precariously balanced on each other, palm trees and ruins everywhere. I have to admit that there were many times on our hike back down the mountain that morning that I was signing the Indiana Jones theme song to myself.  Thankfully we took a different and less precarious route back down and I never had to see the steep drops that we had walked so close to on our way up the mountain.

view from the top of the mountain

Some other highlights from my trip to Hampi include:

-          The shopping there was to do in the little touristy village. I finally got good at bartering and bought myself a pair of awesome Nepalese pants (jumping the gun a bit on my plans to visit Nepal).

-          Getting henna done by a young and very talkative women who told us all about her son and his dreams to become a pilot

-          The Mango Tree restaurant where we sat on cushions by the low outdoor tables and soaked up the atmosphere of the nearby river.

-          Watching the sunset over the ruins and the jungle from on top of a rock overhanging a steep cliff

-          Hanging out at a cool restaurant/lounge where there was a hippie jam session going on (India is full of the hippie tourists – I love it!). There was one guy who was playing the djembe and the dijereedoo (haha I have no idea how to spell that) at the same time!

-          Taking a boat ride down the river in a large, flat and round bamboo boat

Hyderabad

Hyderabad is a huge city (the largest we will visit on our trip) that is halfway between the North and South of India. It has a lot of Muslim influence and we got to climb up a tower into an ancient Mosque and visit a really cool ruined fort outside the city that was full of Islamic architecture.

My highlight of visiting this bustling city was wandering through the back streets around the markets and admiring all the bangles, fancy pearl jewelry, jeweled burkas, piles of used sariis, carts full of fruits and vegetables, beef hanging in store windows, etc… There was just so much going on and it was easy to get off the beaten tourist track to see people doing their day to day stuff without having to wander down any deserted looking alleys.

Some other highlight for me included:

-          Going to the horse races. I had never been to horse races before ad it was surprisingly exciting when the horses came thundering by where we were sitting. I bet a whole 50 rupees (the equivalent of $1) on one horse, which I lost. It was weird to be the only group of with people in the stands as well as the only group of unaccompanied women.

-          Taking a boat ride out to a giant statue of the Buddha (so big that the statue sunk while they were trying to transport it out to the middle of the lake) and having supper at the ritziest lakefront restraint I think I have ever eaten in afterwards.

-          Going to a Tollywood movie in a mall near our hotel. Tollywood is like Bollywood except the language is different and specific to the area around Hyderabad. The movie was fantastic! I was over 3 hours long and included an intermission. Even though there were no subtitles and we couldn’t understand what they were saying, it was still possible to follow the plot and enjoy all the amazing music, dancing and corny fighting scenes. Only in a Bollywood/Tollywood movie does the frame cut in the middle of a fight scene to show the character’s sketched as cartoons. I laughed so hard my sides hurt.

Our rickshaw drivers admitted they didn't know where they were going after driving us around for an hour. I took advantage of their break to try to figure stuff out to take this photo.

Writing Exams with Henna on my Hands

Practicing the Hindi alphabet

I’m sorry again that this blog post has been so long in the making. Believe me I’m not forgetting about all you wonderful people back home. I will try to make up for it with a complete update.

Since my last blog post I have been busy with school and exploring the area around where we are staying. I have to admit though that my life has been a lot less adventurous since we settled down in Mysore for the first half of our classes for the semester. I am glad to be done exams (my last one was yesterday) and I am excited to hit the road again for some more travelling!

My home for the past few weeks

The place where we are staying is called ODP (Organization for the Development of the People). It is a Catholic Mission but it doesn’t really feel like one. The compound we are staying in is used most often as a conference center. Groups of people involved in agriculture or other things come here to get training or participate in conferences. This means that there is a constant coming and going of people who we have to share out dinning hall and hallways with. It has been interesting to have so many Indian people around from all different walks of life. Last week I got to try to explain to a group of farmers what you would eat peanut butter with when they asked to try some of mine. They asked if it was salty or sweet and I didn’t know what to say. Just now a group of women in sarees walked by my open door, came to say hi and ask where I was from when I smiled at them and then laughed at me good naturedly when they saw the bangles I just picked up from the market today.  Sharing our living space has also had its downsides. The language barrier is usually too tough to get into any kind of real conversation and it took me a while to get used to all the blank stares I get when I walked out the front hallway (I find Indian people have a totally different sense of privacy and personal space than us. For them it is acceptable to stare at people and not even smile or look away when you catch them staring at you). Another downside is the noise, especially in the early mornings. First I am woken up by the often out of tune call to prayer (we are staying in a Muslim area of the city) and have to struggle to get back to sleep with people talking, horking and moving around outside. The building where I am sleeping is set up with a round open hallway that surrounds a courtyard in the middle and it is amplifies sound like crazy. Thankfully the cooks have stopped playing loud Bollywood music in the mornings.

But I really do like ODP. It has many redeeming features such as the pagoda where we can go to study, the rooftop where we do yoga classes some mornings (also a great place to read a book or listen to some music) and the fantastic department store (and joined restaurant) only a 2 minute walk away that sells everything we could ever need including Indian sweets, peanut butter, delicious milk shakes and cardamom flavoured green milk in a jar. Even the pond with the life-sized statue of Jesus outside of my bedroom door is growing on me (especially since we got back from our weekend trip and found a bunch of slices of bread floating in it). I will miss having such a nice, homey, and calm (or at least relatively calm compared to the Indian city on the other side of the walls) compound to hang out in and I will especially miss having all of the students on the semester living so close together.

Yoga classes on the roof (I can do a headstand now!)

School

The classroom where I have all of my classes is inside the compound only a 1 minute walk from my bed. One day our class was forced to start late because there were 3 or 4 big monkeys that had gotten into the garbage in the washroom and were blocking our way into the classroom. The monkeys can be very dangerous and these ones were giving us terrifying glares and snarls whenever we got close. The monkeys were not going to budge until an employee showed up with a pellet gun over his shoulder.

Everyday classes start at 9 and go until just after 5 with an hour break for lunch. Most days I will have at least a couple hours off during the day when classes are being taught that I am not enrolled in. The way the semester is set up we take one set of courses here in Mysore and then another set of courses while we are staying with host families in the North.

These are the courses I just finished writing exams for:

Indian Culture and Civilization: This course was really interesting (apart from the 6 hours of architecture that dragged a bit). We learned about the Indus valley civilization, Buddhism and Jainism, Indian philosophy (“probably it is and it is not and it is indescribable” this is what the Jain philosophers had to say about life the universe and everything). We also learned about the two epic stories of India which I had been hoping to hear ever since I watched the first of BBC’s guide to India and they talked about them. Probably my favourite part of the class though were the characters who taught it. One was a large mostly bald man who always wore white robes and had white lines and the third eye of Siva painted on his forehead. You could tell that both of our teachers were absolutely in love with the aspects of Indian culture that they were teaching us about.

Hindi: This class has been hard but a lot more fun than I expected. I am not good at the memorization, oral or spelling aspect of it…so basically that doesn’t leave very much that I am good at – haha don’t expect me to me able to say much more than “my name is Abby, I study. I have an older and a younger sister” by the time I get home.

Science and Technology (sustainable development): This class covered everything from traditional medicine to alternative energy sources to urbanization to the “Politician, Bureaucrat, Corporate Nexus”. Although it sometimes felt like I was sitting through a very left wing ideological rant I liked hearing about many of the things I had learned about from my International Development classes (like the green revolution and grassroots environmental movements) from an Indian perspective.

Natural Chemicals and the Environment: This class is taught by Chris Hall, one of the Professors who came with us from Guelph. It has been a nice mix to have a really science based class for a change. I just wrote that exam yesterday and my brain is still full of the names of neurotransmitters, and hallucinatory mushrooms.

Mysore

Sitting in a classroom for long hours and being restricted to the ODP compound for a lot of the day was pretty difficult after being on the move for the first few weeks of our trip. Luckily Mysore is a beautiful city and we found ways to keep ourselves from getting too restless. The easiest thing was exploring the neighbourhood outside off our compound. It is a Muslim neighbourhood full of some pretty fancy and colourful houses. It’s cool to see the women in burkas with only their eyes showing and their fancy high heeled sandals poking out from under their long black skirts. There are also a couple of fields nearby where we can go to play frisbee. I don’t think that any of the Indians know what a frisbee is so we get a few weird looks from the soccer and cricket players around us.

Downtown Mysore is a 60 rupee (just over a dollar) rickshaw ride away from where we are staying. Mysore is a little bit calmer and less dirty than other Indian cities that I have seen so far. It has a really awesome market full of rows and rows of people selling fruits, vegetables, onions, flowers and nicknacks. Of course as soon as the shopkeepers or kids running around the market spot us white tourists they start smiling at us, playing titanic on their flutes and asking if we want to buy silver anklets or watch them make incents. Mysore is famous for its sandal wood, silk and essential oils. I have been trying to save most of my shopping money for Rajasthan but it has not been easy.

We have also got the chance to get out and see some of the tourist sites of Mysore. The most famous is probably Mysore Palace. The first time I went to see the palace was at night and only from the outside to see it all light up with thousands of little bulbs. It was spectacular and the palace grounds were full of other tourists. It kind of felt like going to an outdoor concert or festival (minus the music). I also got to see the inside of the palace which was gorgeous, especially the bright turquois domed ballroom. There were peacocks (India’s national bird) in the stained glassed windows.

Mysore Palace

Another of Mysore’s famous sights is Chamundi Hill. This is a pilgrimage site at the top of a hill that overlooks the city. I went into the temple at the top and got hassled through along with a whole lot of Indian pilgrims. In India pilgrimages are a religious activity as well as a recreational one. People go on pilgrimages here kind of the way we would go on vacations. Being in the temple with all these crowding tourists and people asking me for money was a not the calming reflective experience I was hoping for. It was much more fun to walk down the 3000 stone steps back to the city.  Another highlight of Mysore for me was the zoo. It was a huge zoo full of all kinds of animals that were surprisingly well-kept considering that it is a zoo in India. I was happy to see that the standards (in terms of animal compounds and information) were almost as good as zoos I’ve seen in Canada. I got to see lions and tigers and bears (oh my!), but my favourite were the giraffes.

The zoo was full of signs like this one. I never knew zebras could be so ferocious!
I hope that this photo is big enough that you can see the grin on the zookeeper's face

Probably my favourite place in Mysore though is the rooftop restaurant that we found downtown. It is a great place to sit back, have a beer (or bear :P whatever you prefer) and watch the hustle and bustle on the street below. There are always lots of huge (eagle sized) bats flying around above the billboards too. Eating out every once and a while was a nice change from the food we got at ODP. The food was good (especially the breakfasts - spicy curry first thing in the morning is really growing on me) but it was the same thing every day. There are only so many meals in a row that I can enjoy eating rice, chapattis (flat bread kind of like a roti), watery curry, boiled eggs and cucumber slices. Today though they are putting on a special lunch in honour of our last day, rumour has it that there may be chicken for the occasion!

Hanging ou at the rooftop restaurant drinking our Kingfisher beer 

I want to tell you all about the NGOs that we have been visiting and the amazing weekend that we had in Hampi, but….once again I am running out of time and I still need to try to squish everything that has spread over my room in the past month back into my bag before we leave for the train this afternoon.

A bientot!

Ps.

Check out the article about the India semester on the homepage of the University of Guelph Website! If you are wondering why I am not in the group photo at the arboretum in Ooty it is because this photo was taken during my only sick spell of the trip so far (that I talked about in my first blog post). While this picture was being taken I was laying on the grass with another girl who wanted to stay close to the washrooms as well. We were trying to avoid acknowledging the friendly families of Indian tourists who kept asking us if they could have their picture taken with us (I was certainly not feeling my most photogenic that day haha).

http://atguelph.uoguelph.ca/2012/02/guelph-students-explore-india/

Pictures!!!

This is why the streets are so loud

Market at Pondicherry

The Golden Dome at Auroville

Backwater boat tour in Kerala

The big trees at Fort Cochin

Kanyakumari (the southern tip of India)

Sunset at Turtle Bay

Kids from the fishing village holding a crab for us at Turtle Bay

My tent at the Rainforest Retreat

Coffee beans (with ants!)

Crazy looking spider in the rainforest

Last couple weeks of vacation

I have just arrived in Mysore and today was my second day of classes. I will tell you more about what classes and living in Mysore are like once I am a bit more settled in. FIRST I have a lot of catching up to do! The last couple of weeks have been fantastic. We were able to stay longer at each place we visited and it was nice to have some more time to relax and really get a feel for each amazing location. Let me tell you about them.

Sorry, there are still no pictures. I tried to upload some (I even got the perfect ones all picked out) but it didn't end up working :( I will try again soon. For now, try to use your imagination.

Fort Cochin:

Cochin is a beautiful city and the area we stayed in (called Fort Cochin) was especially nice. We were right near the harbour and this was one of the first places that I saw lots of other white tourists walking around. My personal favourite thing about this city was the large amount of green space (parks and open space are rare in other Indian cities) and the giant trees covered in moss that were all over the place.

New experiences/ things that I learned:

-          I learned what black pepper looks like when it grows on a vine

-          I saw how to make rope out of coconut fibber

-          I took a ride on a boat pushed by poles

-          I learned that if your food has not shown up 3 hours after you ordered it you should just leave the restaurant and find somewhere else to eat

-          I saw how ginger is dried in big piles in the ginger warehouse

-          We got to see a performance of local traditional dance and theater where the use of creepy-looking eye movements are a central part of expressing emotion

-          I visited my very first Jain temple and saw the little brooms that are used to brush away insects so that no violence is caused when Jain monks sit down

-          I saw laundry being done by hand in a commercial sized laundry operation where they beat the clothes against a large rock slab as part of the cleaning process

-          I tasted freshly cooked fish  from the Arabian Sea

-          I ate a deep fried banana that I bought from a street vendor

Turtle Bay:

Here we stayed at a beach resort and enjoyed a section of beach pretty much to ourselves (apart from the occasional Indian tourists and locals who would also come by and hang out in the water or take pictures or videos of us tanning on the sand). To the left of our swimming spot there were a bunch of fishing boats pulled up on the sand and a short walk down the beach there were kids from the fishing villages that were more than happy to show us how good they were at catching the little crabs that were constantly running over the sand. One day we visited the packing plant where fish from a dock further down the coast were being processed and also learned about the work a local NGO was doing to provide toilets for the families who lived in the area.

But, most of our time here was spent relaxing in the sun, waiting for good waves to body surf (there were not many of them but the waiting was still fun), watching the sun set over the ocean and hanging out drinking beer and chatting in the evenings.

New experiences/ things that I learned:

-          I learned about Ayurvedic medicine. This is an alternative Indian medicine that is based on the ancient texts and involves encouraging healthy living through balancing the different elements present in every human being. Some of the treatments include massage while others involve cleansing practices like vomiting.

-          I went snorkelling and saw lots of amazing wildlife including jumping fish, white breasted sea eagles, leopard eels (they stick their heads out from rocks with their mouths wide open and wait for fish to swim), and bright blue parrot fish as big as my torso.

-          I visited a village temple and learned you should always walk clockwise

Rainforest Retreat:

This is an organic plantation and guest house that is in the rainforest in the Western Ghats (a mountain range in the South of India).

This was my favourite place of the trip so far. Let me tell you what it was like to wake up in a rainforest. Every morning I would wake up under heavy blankets with my nose freezing cold. I would lay in my tent and listen to the birds singing their little lungs out in the valley outside. Then I would drag myself down the path to the bathroom where there would be a fire already to heat a huge pot of water. The whole room smelt like wood smoke and I used a bucket and pail to poor the lovely warm water over my head (bucket shower style because there was no showerhead). Then I would walk about 5 minutes through the rainforest to the communal eating area where there was hot tea, coffee, milk and lots of sugar waiting for us along with a delicious breakfast of fresh fruit, fresh bread, eggs, and of course the traditional south Indian breakfast dish of idly (rich patties) and sandbar (a savoury soupy dish that sometimes has beans or peas in it). Now that is the way to start a day off right!

We spent our days here learning about the rainforest ecosystem and helping out on the plantation. We also went for some treks through the mountains, saw some spectacular views, went swimming in some rapids and visited the children at the local school. Everything about the buildings (eco-friendly and beautifully designed) and the people here were wonderful and made us all feel instantly at home. The plantation is run by two former biology researchers who left Dehli many years ago to drive south and learn about what was going on in agriculture across the country. Now they have set up this little oasis to investigate and educate people about organic farming methods.

New experiences/ things that I learned:

-          I tried my hand at picking vanilla beans, tea leaves and coffee (less glamorous than it sounds because the coffee berries are often covered in biting ants).

-          I learned how biogass is made out of cow poo using an underground digestion chamber and a valve that brings the gas to the kitchen to be used in the stove

-          I learned about the natural immune system of plants and how biodiversity and predator populations can be used to control pests.

-          I saw elephant dung on an island in the middle of a river

-          I learned that this rainforest habitat is home to over 100 reptile species and over 100 amphibian species. Crazy! I saw some of these species including a turtle in the goose pond, a frog on the bamboo bridge, mini toads on the stone path and a lizard missing 1/4 of its tail outside my tent. The coolest thing I got to see was two huge male rat snakes (probably longer than I am tall) that were dancing and twisting together in the middle of our path home from a walk.

-          I was some weird bugs. The ants would stand up on their back legs and flail at me whenever I tried to take their picture. There were giant spiders that were as big as the palm of my hand that liked to hang out in and around the sinks in the washroom. I saw a spider that was yellow with spots on its pack and spikes on it that made it look like an alien space ship. The woods were full of cone spider webs that looked like little ghostly tornados.

-          I learned that fruit from one of the common trees in the area is harvested by the local people and used to make a strong bear. The potency of the alcohol content varies depending on what time of day the fruit is harvested. It is said to be a healthy baby medicine in the morning, a good beer at lunch and something that will give you a kick you won’t forget at night time.

-          I visited a sacred grove and a temple in the middle of the jungle that is still repainted every year and used in local festivals

-          There is just too much for me to share everything I learned about biology, organic farming, coffee processing, local uses for different plants,  ancient stories, religious festivals, etc. it was an amazing place and all of the hosts (from the intelligent 13year old daughter Mia to the soft spoken caretaker Ravi) had an amazing wealth of knowledge to share. 

Side note: The whole time I was here I kept thinking that if I were studying BIOLOGY and ANTHROPOLOGY and I was especially interested in ECOLOGY and COFFEE this would be the perfect place for me. Funny… I think I know a couple people like that :P. The Rainforest retreat even takes interns, so if you so happen to be interested in these things then ask me about it next time we talk because I would love to tell you even more about it :D :D :D!