The tree is in the Delhi Crafts Museum. It looks very much alive!
First day at school. Serious business!
Tikli trio - the place is filled with lovely kids
Tiger hunt picture also in our room
Hermes Tiger scarf in our room
Usha Kiran has its own temple in the garden - along with a nice, shiny bucket! The hotel also has a couple of very expensive, extremely remote apartments, built under a grassy hillock. We saw inside them and thought how awful it would be to stay in them. They each have their own small pool and sitting out area, but are quite depressing. The Royal Suites on the top floor ar much nicer - but our room, 204, is definitely the best!
Strange corner doorway
The Palace was on seven floors, with loads of steep, badly lit steps
Our excellent guide to the palace
Don't know what this does - but it's got wheels!
Lovely Datia girl
Mosque door sign
Another call to prayer timetable
Messages pinned to the tomb railings
Three headed goddess
This was a 5th century cave painting - looks more like a Gaugin!
This is called the 'Indian Mona Lisa', for obvious reasons, and she lives behind two lots of padlocked doors. Not sure why!
Every hog needs his nose cleaned!
Beautiful sculpure of Nayika
Stylish orange rubber gloves!
Cabbages are grown in the hotel grounds. Not sure if they are decorative or to eat. The ground is completely dry - but they seem to grow, just the same!
Loads of brightly coloured crockery for sale in the market
Silly kid wanted 14p per bead! I declined.
Packaging Indian style
Beautiful, bright blue drawers contain spices
Very unusual cave temple next to Nandi
Washing on he temple wall!
A riverside shrine was much visited on Sunday. This one was painted in lots of vibrant colours. I don't know how often it needs repainting in the hot sun.
Often trees are turned into shrines. This one was, mysteriously, decorated with plastic bags! Still beautiful!
This is a Tamarind tree. There are two types of Tamarind
Trees are a trademark of Mysore. This is a Banyan tree
Roadside letter writer
The lovely, smiling little boy
The sign for a very good rooftop bar and restaurant , right in the centre at Gandhi Square
Mr Bollywood sign
This man would turn his torch on inside the temple at Belur - at a price!
Feeding the monkeys on Coakers Walk
Wrought Iron fence detail
Farming in the mountains - lots of terraces, growing potatoes, onions, cauliflower and carrots
This friendly temple lion was irresistable. I don't know whether it was a Jain Temple, but they often go in for lions at the entrance. Temples in India are often tiny. Many homes have built in shrines, but even public temples can be as small as a little shrine, or even a tree. There seems to be a cororate identity for temples, which consists of red and white vertical stripes, which you can see behind the motorbike.
This is part of the end wall of the museum, which is a huge green exhibit, holding hundreds of stuffed animals in relatively realistic poses. Sounds gruesome, but for some odd reason it works. I never knew that bats could be as furry or as huge!
There is a field just outside the centre, where a lot of the washing is brought to dry. We searched for our underwear - but couldn't see it!
The Post Office, with it's tin roof was hexagonal. The wall on the right is the large picture above left, filled with flowerpots. Quite an amazing feature for a post office!
A chalk drawing near a temple. Could be next years Christmas card! I've never seen a star quite like that!
Babish took this picture of us on our trip to the other lake near kodaikanal. It looks as if we have a way to go in losing our excess weight! Possibly better than we were four weeks ago, though!
This is a very picturesque cemetery, just down the hill from Kodaikanal. It has different gates with notices in different languages. This seems to be the Christian area with lots of bright blue crosses.
Every one loves to go boating on the lake. This year we decided not to paddle or row, but chose to recline on a hotel punt with a lovely, smiley Carlton employee to row us in style! We never discovered motor boats, which would have meant that we could explore the whole lake - but these boys did!
This is the Carlton Hotel letterbox, in which I optimistically posted my postcards home!
Tandem bicycle by the lakeside, which doesn't look as if it goes too far.
We had a wonderful tour of the grounds at Paradisa Plantation. We saw bananas at every stage of their growth, from flower to huge clusters of fully grown bananas. We also saw coffee, tamarind, pepper, mangos, cardamum,avocados, oranges, vanilla and jackfruit. We had some for dinner and it was magical. Not smelly at all!
Sajeer is the chef and Roy is the hotel manager at Paradisa Plantation. Both excellent at what they do - and Roy is a great cook too! Simon owns paradisa Plantation-and knows everyone! The hotel industry seems to be a very small world. He knows our friends at Tranquil and has visited Chris's place near Dindigal. Naturally he also knows Motty and Lali!
Motty and Lali's new car - very green!
snakes under a Banyan tree
Luxmi, the future architect, receiving her new 'award' from a well known and much esteemed British architect.
Luxmi and her awards!
Kavya
Siddharth
Another year - another visit to India! We are delighted to be here, away from cold, recessed, London. We had a very good flight to Mumbai, using the last of our airmiles to fly upper class Virgin. If only all airport lounges were as good as Virgin's. The only down side was that we were charged excess baggage on the way out, for Gods sake! She said she only charged half what she could have charged - and warned us that all our internal flights would charge in these troubled times! Fortunately our connecting Jet Airways flight to Kochi was as good as ever - and didn't charge us anything!
Babish, our wonderful driver from two years ago, met us at Kochi airport, with flowers and a big smile. He then drove us to Kovalam, which is under 200 kilometers and took six hours! What a nightmare! But it was lovely while it was light, to see the Keralan countryside and to recognise places we had been to before. We even passed Luxmi's house, which seems to have been painted bright orange! Driving in the dark was much more scary and even slower. We finally arrived at The Taj Green Cove to a wonderful reception from Sam the duty manager we found so good last year. Just in time for a delicious curry and then bed in the same room as last time. Bliss!
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