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September 22, 2007
India Travels
You probably knew I was in India the past two weeks, yes? No snarky comments coming from my corner probably keyed you in. A has a conference on space policy to deliver a paper at this week, so she had a free ticket to India and we decided to make a trip out of it. We visited Delhi, Agra (Taj Mahal) and 3 cities in the state of Rajasthan (Jaipur, Jodhpur, and Jaisalmer). The rest is travelogue from my notes, photos and what I can remember.
First, getting to Delhi was more of a challenge than normal; Chicago'd limited their inbound air traffic, delaying our flight there to our non-stop connection by 3 hours. Luckily, the ORD->DEL flight itself was delayed an hour so some sprinting through the airport got us onboard (and magically, A's luggage to be stored in Delhi until later, for her conference, made it as well!)
15 hours later, we landed in Delhi and our hotel had sent a driver. We changed some money and bought a SIM card for her phone with a bit of minimal credit to make utility calls while in India, and were off to the hotel, The Yatri House. We crashed pretty quickly.
Some basic intro material--
India in general is a land of forts and tombs, and sticking in the northern area we saw predominately muslim style architecture, with a few exceptions. Combine crazy archways and intricate carving with me and you get a LOT of portal (door, window) and wall shots. Deal.
It was a new camera, and took some getting used to. I've tried to photoshop up some of the earlier photos that came out over- or under- exposed. I also discovered a few important features (time-lapse!) too late. :(
Many tourist attractions charge extra for cameras, and in those cases we just used A's, as it was a more reliable point-and-shoot camera, and also faster on the draw. We'll get her photos up ASAP after the con.
India has a lot of poverty. My mind kept trying to link it to things I've seen in Jamaica, Venezuela and Nicaragua, but it wasn't easily comparable, in any meaningful sense, to any of those. It has the stink of former British colonialism hanging over it in clouds of forms and bureaucracy, but has a clearer path as a nation than Jamaica ever did. It has harsh poverty as bad and often worse than what I saw in Nicaragua and the worst parts of Jamaica, but it is also an IT powerhouse and has some government policies trying to apply its gains there to domestic problems. I don't want to go much farther on this topic because it'd just decay into an attempt to shock you with imagery.
Posted by griffjon at September 22, 2007 07:19 PM
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