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Halfway around the world in 1 year
Welcome to Sotje62 ! My blog intends to make the world a smaller place. Automatically and real-time, the blog traces Beatriz and myself's whereabouts, it might just tell you a thing or 2 that interests me - therefore not you, that's the privilege of having a blog - but read new blogs on the top and click on the pictures in the side bar to see older blogs, the blog,and Beatriz and I hope you grow a good 'travel' appetite. Sotje62 travel blog is in Vlaams (donker gekleurd) and in English (light coloured). So read what you understand and again what you like.
10-05-2009
Ooty, Mysore and Bengaluru (English)
My last blog has the pictures of Thrissur so let me start there to tell you more about the places we have visited on the way starting with Ooty. Ooty, ridiculous name in my opinion and an enough reason not to go there, is high in the western ghats mountains at an altitude of 2,200 metres. It is popular for its tea plantations, hiking trips, cool mountain temperature, and nearby wildlife parks. Having taken a bus from Thrissur (4 hours) and then another bus (7 hours), it took more time than planned. The last 5 hours, the bus climbed and climbed. We did 22km in one hour. I am faster with my foldable bicycle. We saw two head on collisions on the way up too, and that slowed us down a lot. After 5 hours of hair pin bends we got there eventually.
Surprise for us was that it was raining in Ooty. And the lonely planet says it is high season with a 'cool' temperature. We were fooled. we arrived in slippers, 2 hours late so it was dark, and we had too look for a place to stay. After an hour of looking for accomodation, soaked, we gave in to take a room of 1000 rps and make Ooty a short and luxurious stay of one day. We saw the tea plantations on the way up by bus, hiking trip we do another time, and nearby wildlife can stay wild.
A bus trip from Ooty to Mysore takes 6 hours. The bus goes through wilderness, national parks and local tribal villages. Mysore is good times, being popular for incenses, parfums and its palace. We found accomodation fairly quickly and thought to stay a few days after the many bus trips.
Walking around on the amazingly colourful market of Mysore, we found out what else Mysore is popular for. Good salespeople. They don't do good business with us though. A good example is the incenses and parfums salesman. He showed us how incenses are made. You mix sandwood with water and you get a moisty paste. That paste you roll on to a small bamboo stick and incense is done. One person can make around 5,000 to 6,000 incenses per day. He shows us a book of all Belgian customers with pictures and notes in Flemish. The guy even spoke a bit of Flemish. It is really weird to hear an Indian, that has never left his country, ask you "Hoe gaat het ?" and translate things for you. Other oneliners are Como estais ? Barcelola and I know Bilbao .... from a James Bond movie : )) We had to leave politely when he started to give us tips of how to send parcels to Belgium and how nice his parfums are as a gift and that it is better to buy them per 10.
Mysore its nice palace, the Maharaja palace, is worth to see and there are a few nice temples. Also it was a good place to eat for its upper class restaurants and we were happy to find Cafe coffe day in Mysore. No kidding, that is the best place to have breakfast in India !!
Bengaluru, next stop, is unmissable for IT people like Bea and me. Infosys is in Bangalore and have a whole campus for them, and the development of B're as an IT-hub changed the area around MG road dramatically. there is KFC (understandble, they have chicken), Mc Donalds (only chicken, Big Mac is Maharastjha Mac :)), pizza hut, also good restaurants, Louis Vitton & chanel stores, Levi's and Lee stores, many cafe coffee days, convenience sotres (Bea even found chorizo there !) and the whole area has western prices and the public is young and fashionable. This is the MG road area, the Mahatmi Ghandi road area. Once yhou go outside the area, B're is like every Indian city, crowded, chaotic, the traffic is a playground, rickshaws, motorbikes and buses buzzing around, and it is like the people never sleep. It's intensity in overdrive 24/7.
Now that I talk about IT, I heard the news that Oracle has taken over Sun Microsystems. It is not really a shock that Sun is bought by a big player, but incredible that it is Oracle again. That raises a lot of questions on roadmaps of Sun and Oracle products and what customers think about the take over. A customer that was on Oracle, BEA and Sun 2 years ago, is now completely on Oracle. It is hard to get your head around it. I will defo follow that more.
Tomorrow we go to Hampi, a very hot place. Hopefully I didn't write too many mistakes cause in this blog because it was quickly done,
16.09.09. Half-Round the world in 1 year / Kick off. 9th of April 2009, Mumbai, India’s biggest city, is our best destination to take the train south to Goa, Kerala and Bangalore. From there we go 4,000 km by train back to north India, see Karnataka, Rajasthan, the Taj Mahal, Varanasi and Nepal. In Nepal we do small treks in the Himalayas and visit Kathmandu. Over de friendship highway, the route goes from Kathmandu to Lhasa by jeep, maximum altitude 5250m and we get to see the Mount Everest. In Lhasa we take the train through China, see the Terracotta warriors in Xi'an, and go 3,500m north to enter Mongolia and arrive in Ulan Bator. In Mongolia we camp in the Khovsgol area near the Russian Siberia, and renew the Chinese Visa to go back south. The clock says 4 months when we trained through China and see Yunnan, South China with its wonderful terraced rice fields. We enter the tropics and after 6 months travels we are in Vietnam. 2 months after that, we should have seen Angkor, the beaches in Thailand & Maleysia ...<e.d. 25.10.09. There is a change of plan after Angkor: we fly from Bangkok to Manila, we go to the Philippines!!> and on a ferry to Indonesia. From either Kuala Lumpur or Bangkok, we find our way to Sydney and work for 3 months. We will have traveled for 1 year when we are in Oz and ... and ... and ... that is how far we planned. But we were supposed to come back in 1 year but we are only half around the world. Beatriz and myself love Asia!! So much for planning ahead and scheduling. Let's just see how we get on and the more exciting our trip will be. Wish us good luck on the trip!!
