Holy Cow!

From decent, civilized & calm New Zealand to the bustling, hot, hassling India was quite something...The first impression of India was just chaos - loads of (holy) cows on the roads, driving with no rules whatsoever, street sellers and beggars chasing us...a complete mess...but then miracously some system seemed to arise out of it...it all worked somehow like in a flow...
Sadly we found out that there were several bomb blasts in bigger cities in the northern part of India (still the old conflict between Muslims and Hindus) and one was even going up in a market in Delhi while we were there (there seem to be barely any news in western media about them). Partly because of that and partly because Nepal seemed to us more attractive than India, we decided to move as fast as possible to Nepal and just made a one-week round-trip through some places in Rajasthan.
From the places we've seen the Taj Mahal in Agra was definitely among the most amazing! And we also liked the small town Pushkar, a holy place for Hindus and a fantastic place for us to relax, do some camel-trekking & visit tempels...and joining a Hinduistic puja, daily held ceremony to worship a specific god.
We also practiced twice Indian dandiya dancing, something between fighting and dancing with sticks, at a local festival.

We're now already a couple of days in Kathmandu - mainly spending our time in our hotel-room to recover ourselves from a food poisoning we got the first day we arrived here (actually in our - quite expensive - hotel!) - but it all seems sooooo peaceful here compared to India...incredible...
we're both looking forward to see more of this country and do some trekking here.

Meanwhile to feel more energized after our demanding health-crisis we practiced some Nepali yoga. The yoga teacher mentioned that there's still some hope for Roger before the degration starts :)
Roger & Franziska