Settled in!

Africa is incredible! Much more hardcore than India. We’re just outside Kampala (the capital, but you would believe it was a capital city, bit of a dive...but hey, the clubs and bars are pretty good, although last night was my lst night out here and I doubt ill get the chance again for ages). I'm currently planning my travels and stuff like that, so many things to do, so little time, so little money! Africa is more expensive than India - or it may be that because everything is in thousands it just sounds more expensive (roughly 3400 Ugandan shillings to the pound).
I’m really getting into the orphanage, at first it seemed like we weren’t making that much difference but after a week I realized how much we really are helping the kids (aside from giving tons of money!), they have much better English than all their classmates and this is a huge help because pretty much all teaching later and most now is done in English, which if they struggle with English they're not gunna be able to learn easily. health and hugs, increased opportunities for them to interact (i.e. Jess brought the break dancers to the orphanage to give them a class which they loved! It was so cute!), checking they get enough of the right foods, paying school fees ect...
My personal project is going to be redecorating, or possibly decorating in the first place! Their dorms, the dining room, the kitchen ect all desperately need painting. They look awful! So I’m going to make sure some of my donation money goes towards paints and hopefully I’ll be able to help paint as well - I really want to feel like I’m doing something!
I was told the orphanage was non-religious (neo-humanism something or other?) but it’s really Christian! The kids go to the local church on Sundays, which is in Luanda so I haven’t got a clue what’s being said. It’s crazy, members of the choir were genuinely doing butt dance in the aisle!! The main bloke who runs the orphanage started training to become a priest but didn’t finish it for some reason - I’m making use of one of his old text books on the synoptic gospels at the mo - really interesting but written in 1966 so possibly not the most up to date... I’m going to All Saints in an hour for an English service, should be interesting. It’s such an added bonus!

Uganda here I come!

I arrived all safe and sound - its a good job I left bangalore when I did, I only just got there in time beacause for some reason my plane left 45 mins early!!
Ok, the orphanage where I work and live has 23 kids, slightly more boys than girls, and links to 10 kids in foster care. Their mother tongue is Luanda but they all speak pretty good English. There are two boys’ dorms, one girls’ dorm, a large dining room, kitchen for cooking, kitchen for washing, a shower and toilet block, room for the uncles (Ugandan workers). Then there’s the volunteers building; you walk in and its a kind of art room/library with a table, this is where the kids (mainly the boys) come and draw or just muck about with us. On each side is a bedroom, one for me and the other for Marieke (Irish 27year old woman, really nice, she’s been here for a month and has another month left but she may stay in Uganda doing something else.) Mine has the medicine cabinet in and stuff like that, hers has the box of toys and clothes we haven’t given out yet (because they don’t need everything at once).

We have no running water and so the kids carry water from the well (about a five min walk away) to a large tank, which they fill up and the water is used for washing, boiled for cooking or filtered/ boiled for drinking. So no showers or taps!! Just a bucket for washing! There’s no electricity either except for the solar paneled batteries that are used for the light bulbs in each room.

Our main jobs are playing with the kids, checking on their health and hygiene (getting them all to brush there teeth, handing out multivitamins, cleansing and plastering up/ bandaging wounds, handing out paracetamol or other medicines they need, taking them to the doctor or dentist etc..), making afternoon snacks and drinks of squash, then when schools on we take reading lessons (which sound very similar to Christel house stuff, but its been Easter so I don’t really know) and PE. but in general the main help is really financial, its our money that pays for food, clothes, school fees etc... The item on uncle Ben’s wish list at the moment is a septic tank, so hopefully we'll raise enough for that.

In general Uganda is much more hard core than India! I was expecting it to be a lot more westernized in the capital but I think the effect of 80% unemployment in the country is that many things are in bad condition. The roads in particular are appalling!! They’re not even dirt tracks! In the area I live the roads are red dust but there’s not more than a metre width of proper flat road anywhere, they’re worn away by cars and rain. Our cars wouldn’t have a chance!! It’s also a lot cooler than I was expecting, it was hotter in India by far, particularly south India than it is here - which is great!! And I think that July is their winter - although it’s not a very noticeable change!

Internet connection here is abysmal so sorry if I don't keep in very good contact - it takes 15 mins to upload reading an email, let alone sending one!!

The end of India... :-(

I haven’t written in ages so I’ll just do a quick catch up and then write about Uganda. I think the only thing I didn’t write about was my last bout of traveling which was round south India again. I went with a friend I made in Bangalore, a girl called Faria from London who I love to bits!! (esp if she’s reading this!) We had a girls trip to Kochi with about 6 of us then the others had to return to work in Bangalore for Monday morning and Faria and I went round Kerela. The night they left we went to a Kerelan dance concert which happens every night, it was incredible to watch them. The makeup is applied on stage, starting a 6pm and the actual show starts at 8pm just after they’ve finished! It’s a work of art in itself! The faces a painted in huge bright colours, each of which have meanings (so green or red paint indicates evil characters etc…) – I’ll upload photos at some point, I even have videos of some of it. Then they reenact stories from the Hindu holy texts. After we went to dinner in an absolutely gorgeous restaurant on the water side (average 2 pounds per head!!), but the best part of the evening was the rain! We were sat out in the open eating and all of a sudden it started to properly rain, then there was thunder and huge bolts of lightening! We stayed outside eating, it was the first rain we’d had in 3 months of being out there and there was no way we were gunna miss it!

First stop Munnar, it’s a tea plantation area up in the hills and definitely one of the most gorgeous areas of India I saw. We took a package tour from Kochi which left at 6.30 am on Monday morning and took us to an elephant sanctuary where we got to help bath the elephants! I scrubbed behind an elephants ears! They were so docile and did exactly what their keepers instructed them. The most incredible thing was when the keeper scratched behind one of the elephants ears, he then promptly lifted his front foot for the keeper to stand on and climb up onto his back!! After we continued driving to Munnar, through the hills and valleys of Kerela, en route convincing our driver to come speed boating with us on the lake created by a dam (we saw wild elephants by the side of the lake baby!!). We arrived to find our hotel was one of the best we’d ever stayed at, complete with television, en suite, double bed and balcony overlooking the plantations and the sunrise (which Faria kicked me out of bed for, but I went back again 5 mins later, I really had seen sunrise practically everyday up north, I like my sleep!!). We walked through the plantations in the morning, then visited a really interesting tea museum where they showed you the whole process, and a spice garden on the way back to Kochi.

From Kochi we made our way to Varkala, a really touristy beach on the west coast, where we stayed for couple of days. On the first day we took a yoga class, but it was harder work than I’d expected and so I didn’t bother again! I got incredibly sunburnt in the sea, literally bright red, and so really enjoyed the full body massage we’d already booked for that evening!! Faria went back to Bangalore the next day to catch a flight back to London, and I stayed in Varkala for a few more days relaxing and meeting other tourists.

Then I wandered up further north to meet my Bangalore buddies in Gokarna, another beach area!! We stayed in little beach huts with no electricity, padlocks on the door or organization of any kind (they barely wrote down what food we ordered all weekend so trying to pay when we left was interesting to say the least!) But it was directly on the beach, you only had to walk 5 steps from the front of the cafe area to be in the sea!

India was an amazing experience, and I learnt a lot from it, but I don’t have time to go into detail about that! Some other time maybe. For now though I’m going to start writing about Uganda.

North India completed

I've been so busy I haven't had time to write this blog for ages!! Probably should fill it with what I spent some of the last two weeks doing...
After Pushkar Sara and I set off to Dehli, via a night bus... it was a joy!!...but we got there in one piece. We arrived at 4am and caught an auto to a cafe where we sat playing canasta and drinking cup after cup of chai (indian tea, a dozen cups each!!) until it was late enough to call on a contact we had in Dehli to drop our stuff off. Spent the day sight seeing and went to a mosque in the evening. A friend had told us there was this place where they sang and the atmosphere was buzzing and we just had to visit it, he forgot to mention it was a mosque. The next day we took a local bus to Agra, we are such cheapskates!! The tourist bus would have got there quicker but it would probably have cost 100 extra rupees (1.20 pounds), it's very strange thinking in Indian rupees! I agree over 5 or 10 rupees (6-15p) when I wouldn't even notice if I lost that much in England.
We spent the evening in the poshest hotel I have ever seen, let alone been in. It had gold on the walls and ceilings, smart waiters and doormen who bowed, the cleanest toilets in the whole of India (after 2 months of terrible toilets I was scared to use them!) and a view over the taj mahal which was just unbeatable. We watched the sunset from the balcony drinking expensive cocktails and eating the free nibbles (that they replaced as soon as we finished each bowl, 4 bowls in total!). Then left to find a hotel for one two-hundreth of the price!
Sunrise at the Taj Mahal the next morning (of course!) was amazing. We tagged along with someone else's tour for the tombs and wandered leisurely around the rest. Took far too many photos and were in far too many photos (random Indian and Chinese tourists kept asking to take our photo, as if the taj wasn't enough!). But you know the taj is amazing so I wont try and put it into words.
Back to Dehli and we flew from the airport. Me to Bangalore and Sara eventually got to Vietnam.
I had some time in Bangalore and now I'm in Varkala, Kerela again, and off to have an Ayurvedic massage on a cliff overlooking a stunning beach!

Tourist God

Sat in an internet cafe in Pushkar now, its a really holy city for hindus - they are about 400-1000 temples (depending on who you listen to) in this small city alone. We arrived on the bus from Jaisalmer at about 4am and walked up a mountain (really steep hill is a more accurate description) to watch the sunrise. I have seen more sunrises over the last few weeks than in the rest of my life put together! We were amongst the first up there, we met 3 tourists from Bristol at the top who had been planning to stay in Pushkar for 4 days and now are staying for a month! It really is a gorgeous little town, but so aimed at tourists these days - basically sara and I are going to be shopping all day before we take the bus to Dehli this evening!
Jaisalmer, where we were before, was incredible! We went on a one night, two day camel safari in the desert about 40km froom the town. Rocky, my camel, KNEW it was mating season and when he saw a female camel he would start making this gargaling noise, puff up his cheeks and start walking towards her when I (and often the camel driver) had to steer him back round! We slept on top of a sand dune, singing to the stars, tucked up in our sleeping bags! You have no idea how difficult it was to walk after that!
Gotta go do more shopping and catch a bus! xx

Kerela

I'm sat in Mumbai airport after a crazily busy few days! Sara and I went to Kerela, one of the most gorgeous parts of India for a grand total of one and a half days! We took a 12 hr night train on Monday, a later train than expected because we missed the first by two minutes and had to change our tickets - TWO MINUTES!! I saw it pull away from the station as we were running across the bridge. Various bus journeys later we arrived in Alleppey, and took a 5 hr canoe journey around the Kerelan backwaters. There are miles and miles of natural canals, surrounded by palm trees which make an inchanting rustling sound in the wind that I could (and did) listen to for hours! Birds frequent the backwaters, and we saw heron, eagles and even a kingfisher!!
After we rushed back to the bus station in order to catch bus after bus to the wildlife park. We spent 7 hrs on buses that night and finally reached Kumily, the wildlife sanctuary, at 2.30 am. The bus driver on the last bus was an absolute mentalist!! He must have been driving at over 50mph down country lanes, with millions of tight bends, huge holes in the roads and in the pitch black. Sara and I had to grab hold of the seat in front the whole time in order to not fall off the seat!.
In the morning we went round a spice garden at 8am (never new pepper grew on vines, and the smell of cloves is amazing in the morning!!) and then a boat trip round the sanctury's lake for a couple of hours. For a wildlife sanctury it had surprisingly few animals! We saw one stag, a couple of otters, three wild boar and cows! The promise of elephants was completely unfounded, but the scenery was incredible anyway.
At midday we caught a 6 hr bus back to Kochi, it went on the most gorgeous roundabout route through the Western Ghats. I have never seen such incredible views! My time in the internet cafe has run out! Write again soon xx

Quick update

Sorry I haven't written in a while, I've been busy! I finished work at Christel House on Friday and I start travelling for a couple of weeks on Tuesday. We're taking a flight to Kerela and then on to Mumbai, Jaipur, Agra and Dehli. Then I come back to Bangalore and Sara, the friend I'm travelling with, heads off to Thailand (pretty good huh?).
I move out of Bishop Cotton's when I get back, I've got a place lined up in Cooke Town, directly opposite to a friend of mine! It's fantastic luck, and I owe it to Raj, a friend out here who sorted it out for me. It's on the 3rd floor, with a terrace, for the bargin price of about 50 pounds a month. It has no kitchen, but I don't even enter the kitchen I have at the moment anyway, and no hot water (which is slightly more of an inconvienience, but I'll just call Ellie and she'll let me use her shower...although she doesn't know this yet!). Pictures will follow!
Got to go and book flights now! Write soon! xx