An aerogram from India

Over the past few weeks we've been busy helping my mother to downsize and move house. One of the things we discovered is that she has kept every postcard and letter that she ever received from me. It was because of this that I stumbled across this old aerogram that I wrote to her the last time I lived in India, thirty years ago. I was curious to see what I'd written about way back then when I was working in Jammu and Kashmir. Here are a few extracts.

From Sonamarg in Kashmir

We walked up to a glacier.  Once there it started to blizzard - lumps of ice were hitting me, so I hurried to the bottom of the valley and sheltered under a lorry or horse manure.  After it stopped raining I got in lift in the back of the same lorry to a Dak Bungalow where I stayed the night.  It was so cold I was wearing every stitch of clothing that I'd brought and was still shivering. 

Each of the towns and villages here has a different craft.  We went through one village that only sold cricket bats!  In Kashmir there is a lot of wood carving and papier mache - each box brightly pained with a scene from mythology.

In contrast this is what I wrote from Agra where I travelled for a visit

In Agra it's 48 degrees C in the shade.  At night it's still in the upper 30s.  The journey to Agra was exceptionally long and tiring and took about 38 hours by bus and train, including about a 2 hour queue for a train ticket at Jammu.  The train journey itself was hot and sticky - not much air gets into the carriages and the air that does is burning hot.  At Agra station I got a lift to the hotel in a horse drawn cart.  The two boys who drove it decided to race everything else in sight.  I can tell you Ben Hur had nothing on us!  The hotel was full but they let me sleep on the roof which was nice - relatively cool and with a view over to the Taj, but the best thing about the hotel is the food.  Most of the time I've been relatively careful about eating - no fruit etc - now I'm relaxing a bit.  I drink the water and today even had a mango.  I've been healthy up to now too, though somewhat dirty and sweaty.  In Agra there is an electricity and water strike!  The water is turned off from about 1 - 6 pm and the electricity from ab out 3-5pm and for an hour in the evenings  The afternoons are like being in a sauna with no fans to circulate the air and not even the luxury of a shower to cool off by.  And to think that in England people actually pay to sit in little rooms and sweat!

At the time I wrote: "So much news but I can't write half of it down because it's sights and smells".   I'm planning on doing a better job of recording our adventure to India this time around.