Willows India update - early 2013

 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.