louiseinlimbo

My introduction to Bangladesh was challenging, but rewarding.  I'd booked the first few nights in a cheap part of town near a big bus interchange, to help me find my way around the city, and I knew that it was possible to take a bus directly there from the airport.  So I stepped out of the aiport into the hot, sticky, polluted air of Dhaka, to the bus stop, and fended off the rickshaw drivers by telling them I was going "far ... to Jatrabari".  The bus stop was chaotic, with so many different buses pulling in, none of them with anything written in Western lettering, so I couldn't read the bus company names nor the destinations.  But it didn't matter, as one of the rickshaw drivers caught my attention and pointed to a bus pulling in - "Jatrabari bus!" he said, and indeed it was.  People made space for me at the front of the bus, two people who spoke some English tried to make conversation, and I was told when we were arriving at my stop.  Another place fu...

I took a short internal flight to Kolkata, thinking (i) that I should see this important city, and (ii) that it would give me relatively easy access across the border to Bangladesh, where I intended to go next.  As well as some ten days to catch up with admin (sorting out photos, sending overdue emails, checking Bangladesh entry requirements, etc) and sleep, with the added bonus of having found a reasonably comfortable hostel for £3.50 a day including breakfast! The first thing on my agenda was to complete the online Bangladesh visa form and take a printed copy of that and various supporting documents to their visa application centre.  However … the lady there who went through my documents informed me that it takes 18-21 days to get the visa, and I had only nine days left before my India visa expired, so this route was not open to me (not to mention her feedback that they could not process the application without my providing them with an Indian phone number!).  So, sadly...

It didn't bode well - cloudy skies, occasional showers ... not good, apparently, for tiger-spotting.  But we drove out into Pench Tiger Reserve, keeping our fingers crossed.  & happily there was plenty of other wildlife to see - spotted deer everywhere, various other deer species including sambar deer and swamp deer, jackals, gaur, wild boar, and a few birds.  Then we saw a couple of other jeeps parked, their occupants looking high up into the trees - a leopard!  Or at least a couple of leopard legs dangling from a branch, a tail occasionally coming into view ... in some ways not a great sighting, but apparently it is quite rare to see a leopard in a tree so we were supposed to be particularly grateful for this sighting! The next day we had another sighting of a leopard in a tree, with the face coming into view a couple of times, and plenty more nice views of other animals, but still no tiger.  On day three we heard the alarm calls of the langur monkeys, and...

I had another organised tour booked in India, to try for something else on my bucket list - seeing a tiger in the wild!!  But before that, I had a spare week - enough time to see the UNESCO-listed Ajanta and Ellora Caves. So I started in Aurangabad, the nearest city to these caves, where my hostel seemed to have no international travellers staying, but plenty of friendly Indians, who persuaded me to join forces with them so that we could pool resources to hire a large taxi for the day rather than wasting time with buses to get to the rather distant Ajanta.  Probably worthwhile, as there are some thirty Buddhist caves excavated around a horseshoe-shaped river gorge, full of wall and ceiling paintings, and statues - we even hired a site guide, who did point out some corners that I would otherwise have missed (and gave us great information on the history ... information which I'm afraid went in one ear and out the other). So I agreed to also spend the next day with a couple of th...

                          Another group tour … 18 days from Xi’an to Kashgar, largely following one of the old Silk Road routes and taking in beautiful landscapes (bare, stark mountains and sandy deserts), ancient Buddhist grottoes in caves, old walls and forts, encounters with bactrian camels (including a brief camel trek), a day wandering around a massive Buddhist monastery, visits to a few former mosques (including to understand the largely unspoken reason for this ‘former’ status), and dealing with various different aspects of Chinese culture.  Not to mention the Great (fire)Wall, where internet access to the BBC, to Facebook, to my photo storage accounts, to my Yahoo email account, to Google maps, etc is blocked unless you planned ahead and installed a foreign e-Sim or a VPN.  I’m drafting this whilst on my outward flight, and the early parts of the tour really feel as though they were months (if not years) ...

There aren’t that many flights out of Dushanbe, and looking at possible stop-overs to use the eleven days before I needed to meet my tour group in Xi’an, the prime candidate was Istanbul – not in the now expensive city (although it's still one of my favourites in the world), but saving some money, and taking a rest, at the cat shelter near the airport.   I asked the owner, and she was very happy to have me back, as she was to be out of the country and my presence would enable her to give her local helpers some time off. But, really, is it worth the cost-saving??   It’s not that I mind re-filling food and water bowls or cleaning litter trays, it’s the time between that is difficult.   There’s very little internet connectivity, so backing-up photos or perusing YouTube is not possible, and I quickly got through the one book I brought with me. but in any case, the over-arching ’problem’ is the attention from all the cats.   They want to be loved, so they climb all over...