Trip to India: Thursday & Friday July 21-22, 2011

I wanted to hang out with Avanti and Surbhi on my next trip to Khajuraho. When we parted I found out that they were going to be in Khajuraho 3 days after me and 2 days earlier they would be in a place that was kinda close to Khajuraho. I was thinking of extending my trip when they told me that it was quite easy for tourists to book train tickets by showing our tourist visa without having to book a month in advance. So that was the plan anyways but unfortunately didn’t come to much fruition when they told me that they were coming to Khaju in 5 days instead of 3. I was kinda bummed out but what can I say.

The trip to Khajuraho was a trip too long in duration. It was like a 20 hour train journey and another three and a half hour on the bus. Khajuraho is a village and it’s located in Madhya Pradesh well off the beaten path. The only way to get there was either by plane or by train and then by bus. If you think the plane was convenient, you would be wrong. There was no direct planes to Khaju from Pune and so I would have to fly to Delhi, and I believe wait for a day there for a connecting flight in to Khaju. There are only 4 flights per week from Delhi to Khaju...and it was pretty pricy.

2nd class AC...there are no 1st class.

The views were terrible...with fogged up windows.

I got to Khaju on Friday at around 5 in the evening, mind you...I left Pune the day before at 2:45 pm. Khajuraho turned out to be quite a popular place...there were many foreign tourists and a lot of Indian tourists as well. Now that the season is about to begin, there are roughly 2000 daily visitors to Khajuraho...which consists of 150 foreigners....a lot of them were French...I didn’t meet too many Americans.

To get the best view, you can open the door to the train.

views from the train...it was kinda unsafe to have doors open when the train was going at the speed of 120km/h

Khajuraho reminded me a lot like Delhi where everyone approaches you and asks if you can come into their shop. But now that I’ve been in India for over 2 months, I wasn’t intimidated...as a matter of fact I sometimes take them up for it and actually got to know more about the locals and their livelihood. But it got quite annoying when one after another asked me whether I was from Japan or Korea. One redeeming factor was that I also got some opportunities to visit the local villages around Khajuraho which was a lot of fun. It just made me want to see more villages in India.

I think that ppl come to Khajuraho for only one reason: to visit the marvelous erotic figures that were carved in sandstone outside the temple. I’m not sure how much of the temples have been restored and how much of it survived but what I saw was quite incredible. Really incredible work of art...the figures were all beautifully done but some statues were partially destroyed by the Muslim invasion in the middle ages.