Mumbai Jumbo

Note: The photos on this blog are not all sized yet but you can click on most of them if you want full screen...and none are cropped or color corrected...it's enough the blog is here. Disregard the stories if only to afford the time to take a quick look through all the pages of the photos as there are some really cool images here. To flip pages you have to click on "older posts" at the bottom of each page to continue on.
Also...what tales and amusing anecdotes I have put down are from my view.
I hope Lynne gets some time to add hers. -Bav

Lynne Cook and Mark Bava in India - Prologue:
When we finally decided to go to India, we were headed to Kerala to meet friends with our own huge itinerary to follow. From there, with only a one month trip we were going to attempt to see some of both the north and the south and we were going to try to hit Goa, Kerala, Hampi, Elora and Ajunta, Varanasi, Rishikesh, maybe Dharmsala, and back through Rajastan to Mumbai.
Its not like we were naive to the fact that this was completely insane, but regardless of how it went, Mumbai seemed to be the somewhat logical fly-in point.
We didn't use a travel agent and you sort of need to pre-book a lot of the train tickets and hotels that would be sold-out otherwise. Its tricky getting available tickets in the class you want without being committed to a hard itinerary.... having the freedom to wander as you wish can also get you stuck somewhere or without a place to go. Learning to use the India train timetables is another trick in itself.

All this took weeks of bookings, cancellations and re-bookings. Add that to Lynne and my decision making process and both our addiction to possibilities, and it was some kind of miracle...equal to manifesting ashes or flowers from thin air, that we even made it to the SF airport let alone to India. Plus it wasn't like we were 100% sure about the trip anyway. For weeks previous one of us would occasionally look at the other and simply say "India? ....really?" We knew India was changing and it was maybe now or never. I also sort of felt I should have gone in my 20's when everyone else I knew had gone. Plus every single.. everyone reminded us that we would get sick.."everyone gets sick" I heard, "make sure to only eat cooked vegetables...no meat, no ice cream, forget salads... especially tomatoes and eat only fruit you can peel and maybe you'll get lucky".

To make the decision, it was just a matter to buy a non refundable airline ticket. There was non-duality for ya...the decision was no longer in our hands.

And the of course... there were those damn $300 malaria pills... once again...the same ones we took when we went to Nicaragua and didn't need. I mean if you don't get malaria, you can still get dengue fever which there is nothing for. Who knows what taking malaria pills does on your system?...better to just not get bit and as they have cures for malaria, we decided we wanted to take the pills back...however, there is some things you can't take back to Costco; used malaria pills would be one.
A lot of decisions were beginning to be made for us. The Power was at work.

In the end, our friends couldn't go to India and we were left with these plane tickets and a trip for ourselves.
It was better this way...we are headed in a whirlwind of too many places plus Lynne and I have a propensity for looking for trouble.
If we ever were to need lawyers, guns or money, the less the better right?