India

Got a few more minutes than usual on the Internet right now, so I've actually got a chance to add another entry! There's been a lot happened since we had a go at Kilimanjaro - we had an amazing time on the safari through Serengeti and Ngorogoro, saw so many incredible things. I'm not sure whether the highlight was watching a lioness break off from a pride of 7 lions and hunt some antelope, or spending 5 minutes or so right in the middle of a herd (?) of elephants munching their way through the trees and tussling amongst themselves. Or maybe it was watching a cheetah finishing off it's breakfast - a leg of some antelope or zebra :)

After the dusty tracks of the safari national parks, it was a real pleasure to get to the clear blue seas and white sands of Zanzibar. We had a day in Stone Town, but found that the streets seemed just to be lined with tourist tat shops. It was much more relaxed on the northern beaches, where we just chilled out for a few days. A national election was due for the 30th October, and Zanzibar has a history of political unrest, so we decided to move our departure date forward by a few days to be on the safe side.

Right now, we're in Pushkar in Rajasthan. It's a holy place to Hindus, but that hasn't stopped them scamming and peddling overpriced crap. We've had our guard well and truly up since arriving in India, but let it down when we arrived here - and were promptly burned for a "donation" by some "priests". Shameless, these people. Delhi was madness, absolute chaos on the roads, and incredibly smoggy and polluted. Jaipur was similarly mad, but magical. A highlight there was staying the night at the Nahargar Fort - built a few hundred years ago across the top of a ridge looking over the city, there's a single room available to stay. The bedroom is octagonal, with the 4 sides around the head of the low bed being windows with uninterrupted views over the city - amazing.

We had come to Pushkar for the camel fair, but it turns out that it's not on for another couple of weeks. So, we'll just hang out here and relax (hence the free time to be online!).

Absolutely randomly, we bumped into Cassi last night - in fact, he spotted the back of my head through the door of the internet cafe and called my name. We knew he was in India somewhere, but didn' tknow where, so that was a perfect turn of luck to bump into each other.

Heard the news last night that there have been bombs in Delhi - checking on the BBC just now, one of the bombs was in the Paharganj street bazaar, which was where we stayed for 3 nights last week. It's a real backpacker place, as well as always being incredibly jammed with Indians, and leading to the main New Delhi train station. We're safe where we are, and won't be going back into Delhi city at all on the rest of our travels - still, it's a shock to see in the news.