Happy Holi

The last few days have been interesting ones. We left Bhopal via our first sleeper train, 3 tiered crammed up sleeping in a toasty cabin, slept holding onto my bag in fear. We arrived in Jalbapur the next morning and went straight to the outskirts. We did our first spot of swimming in a gorge nearby in which the rocks were named after Bollywood films. The Easter festival is called 'Holi' in India. All I managed to obtain was that it's about a girl being burnt and hence paint must be thrown over everyone and everything. We then travelled to Kanha national park via public bus. Midway through the journey we stopped off and got out for a drink. We returned to the bus covered from head to toe in paint by the locals and having recieved many warm embraces! In Kanha I went on my first ever safari and, success, saw a tiger. The illness started that day, John and Rog fell victim to travellers diarrhea. We had to go back to Jalbapur to then travel onto Khajuraho, easily the most touristy place we've been yet. The temples in Khajuraho are both very expensive and very pornographic. Furthermore, everyone in the whole city is trying to sell you something or sell you something of someone elses. The next day proved to be one of my most horrible experiences. I had very bad double-ended travellers sickness for a full day! I've recovered now but I'm not keen on getting ill again. We're now in Varanassi which is a maze of a city, very vast in comparrison to everywhere we've been so far. We took a tour up the Gangees yesterday and saw several floating bodies, bones and burning. It's been quite the deathly experience saw far, I've seen everything from car accidents to amputees. Hope you enjoyed the snow!