Traveling at dawn by river along the stepped riverbanks - the ghats - of Varanasi is surprisingly serene. In this early light, at 5 AM, the holy river Ganges flows imperceptibly northward, a half-kilometer wide…
"My baby does the hanky panky" - Tommy James and the Shondells Yes, it's an outrageous pun, but somehow we couldn't help but think of music by the American Shondells from the 1960s. Yet we…
We were losing the light. In the complex array of regulations under which Bandhavgarh National Park operates, the jeeps that take visitors on safaris start at 4pm and must be out the gate by 7pm,…
Despite all our reading in advance, but with plenty of warnings from those who have visited India before, we had steeled ourselves for a lot of hard times in India. Here are some of the…
(Part 1 about Bhopal shows what we saw at Sanchi, whose carved gateways from around 2000 years ago astonished us with their profuse detail and sophistication. Click here to see that post. ) In the…
Atop a huge flat-top hill in Umbria sits the small town of Orvieto, a beautiful site full of medieval buildings still being used for public purposes. At the center of town glows the most magnificent…
She was giving us quite an attitude. Her long arms were arrayed in bracelets, her right hand defiantly planted on her hip, which jutted out sideways. She was all sassy, impertinent, take-no-nonsense, and - according…
Old stone buildings, knitted together by webs of electrical lines, crowd the lanes and back alleys near the New Delhi railroad station, as well as the broader Main Bazaar Road, in the district named Paharganj.…
In India, it is customary to use different hands for different important functions. Think right hand pure; left hand, impure. You pass an object over to another with the right. You eat with the right…
We awoke after our first night in India to the Muslim call to prayer, a high tenor voice chanting over loudspeakers somewhere nearby. Sunlight angled through three imposing stone domes , each with lotus decoration…