INDIAN ADVENTURE - 16th October - sightseeing in Kolkata and home

Last day of the trip. Today I went on a sightseeing tour of Kolkata. We started with a long bus journey - the traffic was terrible and as it was a Bengali festival was better then usual so it gave us some idea of how bad it could be. All over the city they were building temporary temples like we had seen on the previous days in the country. they were also decorating arches with lights.

First stop was a Jain temple. Quite a strange place with statues and architecture from every influence imaginable. Lots of colours though and mirrors which made it an interesting place to look around.

Next stop was a trip to the Ganges the sacred river. It was very dirty but there were plenty of people bathing and fishing - we even saw some fish being caught so it couldn't be completely polluted.




After this we visited the Victoria Memorial - build in rememberence of Queen Victoria and very British - we could have been in London with St Paul's Cathedral near by.

After this we were dropped off in a market place for shopping. We had very little time but Helen managed to buy a Sari and got some instruction on how to put it on.

After this we returned to the hotel to pack and wait for connections to the airport and flights home. I had some time to spare so walked over the road from the hotel to visit the slums. The people were exremely poor and it felt very uncomfortable to be staying in such a grand hotel across the road.

The trip home was relatively uneventful except we very nearly missed our flight due to a late internal flight and traffic crossing Dehli to the international airport. When the tickets were booked we didn't realise that Delhi had 2 different airports!