We have
moved a couple of times since New Year’s. Travelling from Trivandrum to Chennai to
Tirupathi, where we went to the Holy Hill, Tirumala, which has the most visited
temple in the world, it has between 40,000 to 100,000 people (pilgrims), visiting there each day. The temple alone, has
12,000 staff. We were even stupid enough to join the queue
to get inside the temple and it was about half an hour before we realised we
wouldn’t get in until next week, so we exited via the emergengy exit. In October there is a festival where the line
gets 4 or 5 kilometres long!
After Tirupathi, we were off to Hyderabad where we found
grass for the first time in India, unfortunately, not much of it was real. We all spent much of the time in Hyderabad pretty sick, both Dad and Seamus had to visit the hospital, Dad for gastro, and Seamus, yet again another animal attack. We went to Galconda Fort where there are heaps of squirrels and cannons. The
walk through the fort was all up hill, 120 metres, and took ages to get to the top, but the view was worth it. Aslo
in Hyderabad we went to the largest film studio in the world where some of the
terrible Bollywood shows are made. There was a tour of all the cardboard streets where the shows are filmed, but the tour being in Hindi didn't make it too interesting. Most of what was there, was the usual Indian standard (poor), including an unrehersed stunt show with loud explosives, a puppet train and The bonsai garden was pretty impressive along with the length of the queues.
The second spot we went to was the Hope orphanage that Seamus’s
class was writing to. At the orphanage there lived 36 kids aged from 5- 18. These kids at one point were all living on the streets, and Pradeep and Rebecca ( the founders), invited the kids to come and live with them at their house, so it is more like a big family rather than an orphanage. We played cricket and badminton with some of the kids, while mum taught some of the older girls to
sew and dad fixed their computers.
The train out of Hyderabad went for 16 hours and there were 6 people on each of our seats which wasn’t very comfortable. There were also transvestites
walking around wanting money which made things a little more awkward .
In Aurangabad, where we are now, there is another fort that we visited and there was more walking and less to see than the other one but there were lots of monkeys. Yesterday we went to a group of 34 Buddhist and Hindi caves called Ellora caves that where carved 1500 years ago out of a cliff face.
We have just left Omkareshwar
and we are now in Pachmari where there is a big national park we haven’t
visited yet. It has been getting quite cold as we are moving north and we have
needed to buy warm clothes. In
Omkareshwar the monkeys were very game, there were hundreds of them and
we couldn’t carry a bag or food without one of them getting curious or snatching
something. One of them tried to take the camera while dad was filming.
To get from Ajanta to Omkareshwar
, our 7pm train was delayed, and didn’t come until 12.30pm. During that delay, we
met an old man who spoke no English but had a chat to us for about 40 minutes
just presuming we all spoke Hindi. After he had come and gone, then come and
gone two or three more times for some more friendly conversation, all of a sudden, a young man jumped off an
express train going at 80 kms He went sliding across our platform and luckily he
only broke his ribs and cut his hand badly, apparently he jumped because the
train was not going to stop at his station. It’s probably how he gets home every day from
work and lives in the hospital. 
