The ship leaves today without us
at 5:00 and has 1 sea day before arriving in Mumbai at 10:00a.
We were amongst the first ones to
get through the face to face with immigration and off the ship. We met our
guide and driver and we were off to tour Mangalore before our flight to Delhi
in the afternoon.
You have to embrace everything
that is quintessential India. Traffic on steroids and non-stop vehicle horns –
6 lanes of traffic trying to fit into 3. People walking, bikes, tuk tuks,
motorcycles, the occasional cow or goat in the street. The sights and the
sounds! (and smells)
We visited the Gokarnath Temple,
Kadri Temple, St. Aloysius Chapel and Aloysius College.
The Aloysius Chapel was built by
Italian Jesuit Missionaries and the hand-painted murals rival those of the
Sistine Chapel. It really was a very beautiful chapel. Since there was no
photography allowed inside I bought some post cards.
The Gokatnath Temple was built in
1912 by Narayan Guru, the temple is dedicated to Shiva. The façade features a
Chola-style Gompuram or entry tower. The marble interior boasts silver-lined
icons of Shiva and other Hindu divinities. There was gilded architecture and
colorful murals depicting scenes from Hindu mythology.
The Kadri Temple was quite
interesting. We had our shoes removed and were in stocking feet which wasn’t
bad until we went through the area where the worshipers bathe before entering
the temple and there was red mud everywhere. (we may need to burn those
socks..lol) There
is a natural spring at an elevated location at the back of the temple. It is
called Gomukha. The water from this spring is let into 9 ponds of different
sizes adjacent to it. People visiting the temple wash themselves in these ponds
before entering the main temple. FYI: our socks did not come clean.
The Cashew Nut factory was small,
but very interesting. We saw all of the stages of processing the nuts. Only
women worked in the factory and many were crammed into the small hot rooms to
do the various jobs. We saw them being steamed, roasted, drying process and the
ladies manually peeling off the outer skins to produce the final nut product as
well as the removal of the outer shell by either machine or by hand of the nuts
were small. They gave us a couple of bags of free salted cashews and we also
purchased a larger bag. They were quite good. We had finished the tour early
and arrived at the airport with a couple of hours to spare. It was a small one,
so not much to do. We did eat a few tasty empanada type snack foods since it
was lunch time.
We also met another couple from
the ship that were also doing an independent overland to the Taj, but through a
different company. We were on the same flights. It helped that our connecting
flight in Mumbai was on the same plane so we just stayed on board.
From the plane we passed over the
slums, which was quite sobering.
We arrived kinda late at night in
Delhi and we had about a 35 minute ride to the Svelte
Hotel & Personal Suites. Very nice hotel attached to a mall which had at
least 4 levels and was quite modern and upscale. There was also an outside area
that was inside the “protected area”. To get into the mall or hotel you went
through a metal detector and bags were scanned.
We unpacked and hit the hay since we had a
3:30a wakeup call for a 5:00a start tomorrow for the train station.
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