Wednesday, April 17, 2013

April 13, 2013 Mangalore, India 8:00a Overland

Here we will do our last overland trip to see the Taj Mahal. We used a company called Leisure Tours of India.  Devender was very helpful and responsive in putting together a tour for our limited time to suit our needs. www.centralindiatravel.com

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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