The Wandering Two: (No) Tigers, a Taj and the Ganga

Prior to our weekend in Delhi for the 25^th anniversary at the temple we spent a week doing a little bit of traveling with Farshad and Yeeteng. After flying up to Delhi we took a very crowded train up to Ramnagar to go to Corbett Tiger Reserve. Upon reaching Ramnagar we found out that our hotel that we had booked was a further 16 kilometers away and the safari driver who had met us to arrange for our morning safari and drop us at our hotel did not want to take us that far so we called the hotel to arrange a pickup. They came 45 minutes later, and 5 minutes after we left we ran out of gas. We then waited an hour for their friends to come by with gas they had siphoned out of their motorbike to give us and then thankfully made it to the hotel. It is MUCH colder up north than it is in Pune, especially at night. So a few hours later we woke up to go on our safari at the tiger reserve. The safari driver who booked our passes for us booked them for Indian price and upon meeting us realized that half of us were not Indian. He said Naveed would be fine passing as Indian if he just kept his mouth shut and told me to wear Indian clothes and cover my face with a shawl as if I were sleeping when we went through the inspection gate. Luckily we sneaked through just fine and drove around the park for over four hours. We unfortunately did not see any tigers but saw lots of paw prints and some deer, peacocks, lemurs and monkeys and enjoyed the beautiful scenery.

After our safari we took a bus to Haridwar with the intention of then getting another bus to Rishikesh which is where we planned to spend the next two nights. Upon arriving in Haridwar we found millions and millions of pilgrims coming to the Ganges and the banks of the river were set up with thousands upon thousands of white cloth tents for the pilgrims to stay in. There was a massive traffic jam and long lines for the bus so we gave up, hired a taxi to take us the rest of the way and got the heck out of there! It was madness! We spent 2 days in Rishikesh, which is a beautiful town divided by the Ganges flowing in between and surrounded by mountains. Unfortunately both Naveed and I got sick with a flu-ish bug while we were there so we spent most of our time sleeping and being sick… We did get to go white water rafting one morning though which was a lot of fun.

We were then supposed to take the train from Haridwar to Agra and had a waitlisted ticket which normally you can still get on with because people cancel but because of the 100 million pilgrims we did not move up on the waitlist enough to feel confident that we’d make the train so we had to hire a car to drive us to Agra through the night instead. Visited the Taj Mahal and rested a lot to recover from being sick so we’d be ready for the celebrations on the weekend. The next day we had booked a train to Delhi called the Toofan Express. Upon arriving at the train station we found that the train was delayed by 3 hours. After speaking to three different people who worked for the railways and hearing “toofan express is VERRRRRY BAD…. It’s a verrrrry bad train!” we got a little afraid. It was then showing on the monitor that it was going to be delayed a further 2 hours so we decided again to hire a car to drive us to Delhi instead since all the other trains were booked that day. We will always wonder about the Toofan Express and what about it made 3 Indians tell us that it was verrrry bad.

Love,

The Wandering Two