Darjeeling. 2.185 m a.s.l.

So that was my last trip in India. It is Monaday and I spend the last two days here in Darjeeling. Tomorrow I will head home. This time it will be my very home.

The last two days here were just amazing. Unfortunately the internet connection here is too slow to upload pictures. I will do this when I am back home. On Saturday evening I arrived here after my plain had a two hours delay and our Jeep had a one hour brake down. The Jeep ride was quite exciting as they have no railings at the edges :) I also had to sit right in the middle of the first bench and had the gearshift lever right between my legs. So going in the second or forth gear wasn't really a pleasure, I can tell you :).

So yesterday I stood up at three o'clock in morning to see the sunrise. The reason for waking up so early was, that I went to a Hill called Tiger hill from were you have the best view over the whole Himalaya. It was really worth it. Unfortunately it was to cloudy in the direction of the Mt. Everest but you had a clear view to some other 7000's and of course the Kanchenjunga (8586 m). It was just amazing and freezing cold :)
Back in Darjeeling I searched my guest house for one hour as the streets here are so small and all the time there are stairs to take and it is just very confusing. I then went to the Mountaineering Institute to ask for climbing possibilities and of course to see the Mt. Everest Museum. Tenzing Norgay Sherpa the first man, who climbed the Mt. Everest (together with Sir Edmund Hillary) in 1953 used to live in Darjeeling and therefore, of course, the Mt. Everest is very famous here. The museum was just amazing and I would say that just to see this this trip was all worth it. I also visited the place were Tenzing was burnt to ashes.

After that I sneaked around the tea fields and had a few talks with the local people. The people over here are much more friendly then I ever experienced people in India and they seem just so satisfied. It was such a confortable atmosphere as I walked throught the little villages. I visted some temple then and finally went back to the city centre.

Today then I finally went for some climbing at the Mountaineering Institute and it was great fun. In the evening I visited a tea factory and saw the amazing process of making this famous tea. It was really interesting and all the mashines were over 150 years old.

So in a few hours I will go to bed and tomorrow I will see the sunrise one last time and say good bye to Kanchenjunga. Hopefully I will catch a Jeep then and be on time at the airport to make my way back to Delhi. In Delhi I will just pack my stuff, maybe go out with the french guys there and finally hopp on the plain to Germany at 3 o'clock in the morning.

So that was india but this is not the very last post ( ;) @ niki). I will write one more by the end of this week. So see you in Germany then.

bye

bye, bye Bangalore

Hey you,

So this is my last day here in Bangalore. Tonight I am flying to Delhi again. I will spend one day there, saying good-bye to everyone and buy a sweater or something :) Because on Saturday then, I finally go to Darjeeling.

My flight back to Germany will be on Wednesday morning and I will arrive at 6.50 am (5/12/07) in Frankfurt. I hope now, I do not have to tell everybody when I am coming back anymore :)

So I will enjoy my last hours here now and then pack my stuff.

have a nice day.

Pill

trip to Tibet

this weekend I wanted to go to a little village where Tibetan refugees live, so I jumped on a bus to Madikeri on Friday night. Madikeri itself is not a very beautiful village. Though I went to a little hill station to see the sunrise, because I arrived at 5 o'clock in the morning. After a big breakfast I decided to visit some big waterfalls nearby. At least the waterfalls were pretty amazing and I took a rest there for a little time talking to some Indian guys who promised me to visit me sometime in Germany ;)

Back in Madikeri I took a bus to Kushalnagar from where the Tibetan villages are easier to reach. The bus ride was one of the most exciting ones I had over here, as the bus driver really want to test the absolute speed limit you could go with this bus downhill! I have to admit that I was really
scared at some point but although it was a fun ride. I actually really reached the roof f the bus with my head sometimes. In Kushalnagar then I took a rickshaw to the first Tibetan village, called Namdroling.

I visited the golden Temple which is really famous around here. The 18 m Buddha statue there was really impressing and after I walked around the temple environment I took an other rest on a greenfield before the temple and immediatelly fell a sleep. I woke up, because 15 Indians sat around me starting to sing some songs using me as a drum! I was pretty appalled at first but they just thought it was funny. After a little standard chat they left again and I fell back to sleep again. The next time I woke up I was surrounded by a bunch of monks :) Not that surprised this time I finally decided to go on.

The next village I visited was Sera. Roughly 5000 Monks live there and in the immediate vicinity and it is really funny to walk through this village and all the people you see are monks :)
It got finally time to look for a place to stay for the night, but the problem is that you need permission for doing that. This permission of course takes a few months to get it, so I did not even think of applying for that. My plan was to stay in a Buddhist Centre, but when I asked there for a room and admit that I do not have a permit, the first word the Tibetan guy said was "scheisse" :) He really was a funny guy and gave me a room though. If I got caught it would not have looked good for both of us (see the sign). He told me to wait until its dark and to hide from any Jeep I see on the street, because that would be the police on its daily patrol.

Pretty excited after all I went out after six o'clock to go to the main temple. The Tibetan guys at the Buddhist Centre told me that I was really fortunate to come at this time, because at the moment there is a Puja (not the same as a Hindu-Puja) at the Temple. This one year event takes one week and about 4000 monks come there to meditate and pray together. When I arrived at the temple I could already see thousands of shoes lying all around :) I went in carefully and sat down near an other white guy. I was really surprised to see one and after a while I recognized an other western women. It was the most intense atmosphere I ever felt. Sitting there with 4000 Monks and meditate was incredible. When it was finished I went for a walk with the two western people. Sarah lives with the monks every year for some months and she also had a shaved head and wore monk clothes. Coby was here to teach for a couple of weeks and then wanted to travel through India. After some interesting conversations I finally went to bed.

The next morning I had breakfast with some monks and went to explore the city. After lunch I said good-bye to everyone and hopped onto a Bus back to Bangalore.

So that was my last weekend here in Bangalore and on Thursday my time here for the internship is already over. Looking back the time really rushed by. So Thursday I leave for Delhi again and will then fly to Darjeeling for an other 3 days. So then take care.

short update

Gruess di miteinand,

there is not much to say about last weekend because I basicly stayed in Bangalore. I had so much work last week that I had to work a bit on the weekend, too.

On Saturday me and my two roommates went downtown for some shopping. In the evening we tried to go out to some diso. But you have to know that this is much more difficult here then you might think.
As a single man or girl you won't get into any disco. They just allow couples! I still do not get this but what could we do? the only chance to get into a club, as a single, is to pay for a woman. As we were on a low budget this night we did not do this ;)

So we went to some pub. Then they closed. I am serious. At 10:30 they told us that this will be the last order. At 11:30 we got kicked out and there was police all over the place. As you see it was not a long night but it was fun though and we had some beer at least :)

So now I only have two weeks left and next weekend it will be my last weekend in Bangalore! I will try to reach a little Tibetan village next weekend and by next Thursday fly back to Delhi. Then I will already be done with my work here.

In Delhi I will stay one day to visit some friends and then fly on to Darjeeling where I might see the Mount Everest:)

So far

French Pondichery

Maybe it was not a very clever idea to travel at Diwali weekend. I mean, you would think that on a festival which is compared to christmas everyone stays at homw with their families. - NOT!

So as I reached the Bus stand I realized that every bus is already booked out. I tried to convince the bus drivers to let me sit on the floor, but they would not let me. Starnge, in a country where they sometimes sit on the roof of busses :\ Anyways I had to look for an other opportunity. I then met an Indian girl which took me to a place in between Bangalore and Pondichery and from there I took the final bu then. A hard journey but I finally got where I wanted.

Pondichery is located in the very South of Chennai (Madras) on the coast of Inia. Pondichery used to be a French colony and so you find a lot of French architecture which looks very strange in this Indian environment. I found a place to stay in an Ashram with a room facing directly the sea :)

I then visited the city, went to the main sights and tried to get a bus ticket for the next day back to Bangalore. This was very difficult again, but I made it. In the evening I went to meditate with the people living in the Ashram.

The next morning I got up at five o'clock again to see the sunrise and went meditating again. I then had breakfast and walked around the coastline. As I walked out of the city along the coast I reached a little village. A family invited me to their little hut and I had some chais(Indian tea). They shoed me all the pictures of their family and then turned on the TV. They turned it really loud and semmed to be very proud to have one :) I then had to take pictures of all of them and they were so amazed to see the picture afterwards :)

After that I had a huge lunch and went back to Bangalore. This week is very stressy again and I am really looking forward to the next weekend :)

Take care and stuff

Happy Diwali!

Yesterday was Diwali. This is the biggest Festival for Hindus and can be compared to Christmas. Although they celebrate it like new years eve. Like everything here it does not seem to be very organised, as they do not have a certain time when they start the fireworks and you here it all day long. And still today there are some fireworks going on in the streets :) You have to know that fireworks here sound like someone just detonated a car bomb, although the clacker has the size of a AAA-battarie. I guess that is, because there are no prohibeted fireworks here.
The story about Diwali is very long and no one knows it exactly, I think. You here different versions but it does not seem to be a problem. What every story has in common is that it is about Krishna :)

This week was realy busy for me. I shifted my appartement and now I am with an other intern and an Indian colleague in one flat. I do not have a maid anymore so my room stays a mess all day. Unfortunately I realized that I am pretty confortable with that and I feel more like home then before. There are still many things to organise and they take for ages here.

Yesterday I visited the new airport and it was a kind of a gooseflesh felling to see this big project and to know that you are working on that at the moment. I would like to see it when it is finished. We also raced the runway with our car, which I think I wont be able to do again in my life ;).

In a couple of minutes the whole company goes for a Diwali-Lunch. Lots of food again I guess :) I maybe upload some pictures of my room and my roommaid, a liitle gecko, which I named Wilhelm.

By the way, I uploaded some prictures at "Welcome to Boulder Paradise" so check it out and thats it for now.

Happy Diwali once again.

Welcome to Boulder Paradise :)

Cheers,

I am really busy at the moment, so I try to sum up my last weekend which was just awsome. I went to Hampi, which is a little village in eight hours in the north of Bangalore. last Thursday was a national holiday here in Karnataka, so I took the friday off and took the bus on thursday night.

As I arrived in Hampi I took a room, threw my bag off and went to the centre. I visited the huge Temple in the heart of this little village and some other historical places. I imediatelly felt so good in Hampi. All over the place there were little stones, ready to get bouldered. But at lunch time I met a girl from Germany and one from Israel and we decided to go for a boat trip to a temple, called monkey temple. The boats looked quite funny but they did their job. The view from the temple was incredible. We had some dinner afterwoods and then went to see the sunset.

The next day I got up at 4 o' clock in the night to climb a mountain outside of the city to see the sunrise. It seems that there was a stairway leading to the top of the hill but suddenly it disappeared. I already had my climbing shoes with me as I planned to go climbing all day, so I gave a damn about the stairs and started to climb my own way. On the top of that mountain there was a little temple and I decided to climb it's roof also to have the best view. Totaly proud of myself I stood on the roof. But then I saw three people already sitting there. When I asked them how the hell they came up here, they told me that there are stairs even untill the roof. I must had missed them in the dark and we all had to laugh about that. Anyways the sunrise was amazing.

As I said I went climbing that day and it was just like a "all-you-can-eat-buffet". Unfortunately the rocks there were bloody sharp and I had to quit sometime because my fingers could not take it anymore :)

On the way to the other side of the river I met a finish girl, named Milka with who I spend the rest of the day. With some other Israel people she met before we had dinner and hung around.

The next day I went climbing again. This time I met a british guy who was here for climbing also and we had a long session. He also had a crash-pad, so we could also go for some risky ones :) The rest of the day I spent with Milka, her cousin and an Indian guy and caught sometime in the evening the bus back to Bangalore.

There would be so much more to say, but I really have to go back to work now. Bye

P.S.: I will upload more pictures this week and maybe write some more but the internet connection here really sucks.