vacations

Just back from a fantastical vacation of Jodhpur and Jaislamer. A lovely magical place and truly the best part of Rajasthan. The lonely planet has been a valuable guide for us wherever we go. It has helped me in every country and city that I have been as a tourist. Even here it told of the bets place to visit and eat. I fell that the lonely planet must be given the Nobel peace prize for ensuring peace and sanity for tourists while traveling. I wonder why Indians don’t read so much and carry enough material while traveling. I think we just bloody want to leave the trip to the holiday tour organizers whose headache it is to figure the entire thing. And of course ensure that you get good gujju fried food everywhere.
Jaisalmer is one place where I got to eat the most amazing authentic pizzas and some delicious soup. I will remember Jaisalmer and Leh as the two places to go and eat pizzas!

Vacationing with Jispa is quite fun. She is quite a decent traveler and is a generally happy kid. She plays on her own a lot is quite content to be fooling around with her activity books, colors and a white piece of paper. But she also gets to you when she wants you to play. We put her to sleep in the middle bunker and I sleep on the top one. Early morning she woke up and climbed onto my bunker and whacked me on my bum. ‘Wake Up Papa’. Huh!. ‘I got up and I saw its morning so I got up’ ya, its morning alright. Go to sleep. ‘nooooo’. Bloody hell. No one wakes up at 7 in the morning in a train, man. But all said and done train journeys are brilliant with family. Though I sometimes miss the travel in normal sleeper that we did as kids. Now it’s a minimum of three tier A/C. it’s easier to travel without carrying all the bedding. Also the normal sleepers have become really really dirty dusty and ugly. I guess in a trade up mode economy, the people have to seemed to have all moved up but the sanitation seems to have remained bad. I don’t mind traveling with friends in a rag tag sleeper but with family it’s a nice stress free environment that one prefers. Also as one travels northward the trains get dirtier and the crowd quite sad. Lets see how the train journeys to down south might be?

When one goes visiting historical places one realizes the value of reading the Amar Chitra Katha’s when pone was young. Thanks to those I still remember and recollect a lot of the stories that I read. It’s an invaluable learning experience. I have to go and get all the possible ACK’s that were ever printed. Let me try and see how I get my hinds on the entire collection. I have already bought the entire ACK’s Mahabharata. Forget Jispa, I will enjoy reading them all over again.