India – last(ing) impressions!

So after all the build up, apprehension and thinking I was going to hate it, it actually turned out to be good fun, although it has worn us both down a little now! Not only rushing from place to place but being constantly on your guard for people, traffic, scams etc gets tiring! Before arriving one thing that people (mainly those wannabe-hippies again!) had told us was that leaving through Varanasi helps makes sense of it all! No idea what that means or how that would work but to be honest, don’t think I want to make sense of it, that would probably ruin it! How do you make sense of a nation that poo in the street, worship cows, are obsessed with cricket, think Lovely Jubbly is a common English phrase, want to scam you into anything to gain money then accuse you of bad karma when you knock them back, offer you drugs or serve you beer in a teapot, drive on the wrong side of the road straight into on coming traffic without batting an eye-lid! How can any of that make sense and why should it, that is just the way it is here and it is exactly those things that make it such a different place to come and see – for every inch that Singapore may be clean there is about 1000 sq km of India that is filthy dirty! The joys of travelling and seeing these places and who’s to say which is better, if it was all the same the world would be a dull place – get me being all philosphical, I must be tired! So anyway, on a positive note, we made it out of India without developing claustrophobia or agrophobia! Without wearing a silly pair of baggy stripey trousers! We haven’t got conned into shipping 4 tonnes of silk or importing gems back to England! And only one of us got a small bout of illness… so all in all it was very successful! We only touched a small section of the north and it is a huge country with so much more to see so who knows one day we may well come back!!