Rahul of India (Remember Laurence of Arabia)

I am writing this blog because I had to cancel a trek tonight due to problems down below and had some spare time on my hand.
I decided to move to India for more reasons than one. One was to enjoy the mountains of the state of Maharashtra, enjoy the culture and history of the vast country and still be able to be the world citizen and travel around.

I must say I missed the mountains when I was in the Netherlands. How can you blame a country for that, which at places is 15mts below the sea level?
But when in India,

I got a chance and group of people from my university collage whom I had not met for good 10-15 years. It has been brilliant walking in the mountains and just enjoying the nature, some times rugged and other times soft as green velvet. I like the life of a trekker where you sleep, eat on whatever is available and be friends with whoever is available. It is a very simple life and away from the busy city life more near to nature. This also gives me a chance to see the historical artifacts monuments on the way.
The mountains I visited were forts from the legendary king of the region around 300 years ago.
You can visit http://picasaweb.google.com/rahulanene to view the pictures of Mahuli, Brahmagiri, Jivdhan and Harihar. More to come are Ratangad and many more.

I could have spent my current spare time in making some adjustments to the bunk bed of my son but you know what, in India you can get people to get these things done. So why bother and I am not very fond of drills and screwdrivers.

Now talking about culture of India, I went to visit Rajasthan, the land of culture and extravaganza of colors. It is land of large palaces, forts and people who have laid their life to keep their word. But also the land of kings who let their daughters to marry muslim mughal rulers to keep their kingdom and their subjects and the land where kings like Rana Pratap fought all their life against these same oppressive rulers. People who managed to save their kingdoms managed to build beautiful palaces and forts as they were never on the run. Forts in Jaipur, Jodhpur Jaiselmer are brilliant. As Rajasthan is land of kings, to fulfill the hobbies of these kings they have created number of parks for hunting. Thankfully they are now wildlife sanctuaries. Notably Ranthambore, Sariska (by the way had I had a daughter she would have been named after Sariska!) for legendary tigers and Bharatpur for birds, the natural ones of course, I mean the ones with feathers and colored beaks, I mean the ones with feathers, guys I mean the ones which fly!

There are many more places I still have to visit in India. I will update once I have found money and been to more places.

Now for foreign travels, well the plan is to visit Jordan, when I don’t know but I am looking around. Find money, find time and it should be good season to visit! Gosh.

More later! Life has plenty to offer!

Thanks for stopping by, stay lucky and keep breathing the special way!