Turning back

Trip Start Nov 13, 2006
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Trip End May 13, 2007


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Flag of India  ,
Wednesday, April 18, 2007

With only two weeks travel time left in India we decided to try to find our train back to Mumbai. We felt this was a better and quicker option than riding back and would buy us more time to go farther north , hopefully to Amritsar or even Chandigarh. A train from Amritsar would cover the 2,500km trip in 48hrs but riding would take at least a week without trouble !! We tried every possible train but they are all booked out for the month of April so the decision to turn back, but do a loop rather than retrace our steps was made.
We set off travelling sth east on a route that would take us to Mumbai via the caves of Ajanta and Ellora and took in some other cool places such as Chittorgarh and Mandu too.
First stop was Chittorgarh and its fantastic fortress built on a 28km fish shaped site in the 8th century. We spent one day here exploring the fortress and left the next day to the town of Dhar with the only real point of note here being the rain..........yes rain that fell totally out of character for India in April. We took a soaking being totally unprepared for it !!
From Dhar we made our way to the town of Mandu, a small town that sits on a 20km sq plateau on top of a mountain and was the site of an ancient city built in the 10th century. A funny thing happened us here as we unwittingly ruined an english tourist called Jeremy's "mission". When we arrived at our guest house we met Jeremy and immediately saw from his look of horror/dissapointment that he was less than happy to see us. After chatting to him we found out he is attempting to find a place listed in the Lonely Planet that has no other tourists other than himself , and on his 3rd day we arrived and ruined it for him !!! He turned out to be a nice guy and we had dinner with him that night and left early the next day.
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