India is a land of mystery and diversity with extremes in weather, riches and poverty, beauty and ugliness. It’s a land that will confound your senses and reason, leaving you to wonder if you’re lost or enlightened.
It’s a land that will certainly test your patience and your ability to put a lid on your brewing temper. It’s where you’ll find extremes in good and evil, wisdom and ignorance. At one moment, you may wonder where all the good guys have gone. At another moment, you may wonder if all the bad guys have died.
For anyone living in a clean and orderly society like Singapore, travelling in India as a FIT can be challenging. The pages under this title page document my second trip to India (my first was in 1996). This was a rather ambitious trip covering Delhi, Agra, Varanasi, Sarnath (Uttar Pradesh), Bodhgaya (Bihar), Dungeshwari, Patna, Chandigarh (Punjab) and Shimla (Himachal Pradesh). We were also forced to make a trip to Bharatpur in Rajasthan.
But perhaps the most ambitious part was bringing my family along and the one giving the most problems is not always a kid.
Dungeshwari – where mistakes were made and corrected.
The Mahabodhi Temple in Bodhgaya
Varanasi – a city as old as time
Shimla – legacy of British India