Hampi - second week

Hampi's river

I'm starting a new experiment, hopefully it will work for me. (UPDATE: it didn't :-)) I'm going to write for half an hour every morning, and then I will have a complete post for you every weekend.

So this is the first day I'm trying. I'm afraid that it will become too technical, but I hope it will reduce the time I'm investing in the blog. It's very important for me, for having a journal to go back to, and for telling my story. But it's not my top priority and I'm afraid that it takes too much of my time.

27.11

Yesterday was Shabbat, and I took the opportunity to rest. We started the day with a session of yoga, and then a big breakfast in our guest house – omelet, salad, coffee and cake. It was a very good morning :-) I continued my day by sitting in the guesthouse restaurant for a few hours, reading and enjoying my time. After a long siesta, Renana and I went to see the sunset at Hanuman's temple. It is a hill believed to be Hanuman’s (the monkey god) birth place. It was a 40 minutes' walk on the road; the road is relatively safe and quiet and the views are amazing.

We arrived at the bottom of the hill just in time, and prepared to climb the 575 stairs to the top. There was some holiday and all along the steps there were candles, prepared to be lightened by sunset. About every 100 steps you can stop and appreciate the view, the huge boulders and the amazing vegetation everywhere. On the hill is a small temple and you have a short walk to a point that is named "The number 1 sunset place".

We sat at the sunset place, we and many more people. We sat there for an hour and enjoyed the amazing sunset. There are many points to climb here and watch the sun setting, but it's probably one of the best. It's very high in the sky and you can see everything. The only thing that interfered with my enjoyment was the noise. Many people talking, shouting, listening to loud music on their phones. I guess I'm getting old :-)

28.11

Not much to write about yesterday. Renana got stomach problem, not so serious but she needed to rest. So I joined her. We spent most of the day resting in the guesthouse. I finished working on my Pomodoro clock (first version) and uploaded it to FCC (more on it in another post). I also started working on my résumé and looked into sites like jobbatical.com. I love that I don't have pressure to do anything as a tourist and I just feel at home. Every day I can decide whether to work, relax, go for a short/long trip and be spontaneous.

2.12

Not much to write about. I'm not in the mood, and it takes too much of my time. Today Renana and I went to the organic farm I ran by last week and we met the owner. He's an Austrian guy named Peter. He has had this farm for about 15 years. It's a mix of an Ashram and an organic farm. They don't offer any courses, but they have a place for meditation, and lots of different crops. Most of the workers on the farm are locals, and as I understood from Peter, one of the goals of this farm is to help the locals and give them jobs. They have many animals walking around (even a wild boar!), and we heard stories about bears that come to eat their sugar canes. After quite a long talk, we said our goodbyes to Peter. He invited us to come for lunch someday and that’s we are going to do for sure.

We found a garden of those on the way through the mountains

This week was full of pondering, and a lot of self-examination. We decided to change our flight to the beginning of January, meaning that the trip in India is almost over (when you're already traveling for four months, a month is a short time), and that next month we are going to land in Amsterdam. Additionally, I joined a Dutch course in Amsterdam, starting five days after I arrive until the end of January. Renana is unsure about her way from there, but she'll probably go back to Israel and we'll meet in February – we need to decide where, but that's a decision we can postpone. It feels like the end of the adventure, and I'm thinking of how to use it as springboard to the continuation of the trip instead of as the end of it.

Since the part of India is close to an end, we've started to doubt about our decision to stay here in Hampi for the next month. We are thinking of an additional site to visit, maybe Gokarna. It's a village close to the beach, with two main beaches – Om beach and Kudli beach. It's supposed to be quieter than Goa, and we're hearing many good things about it. It's where we meant to go before coming to Hampi. We actually made up our mind about it, and now we are trying to decide either to go there next week and come back here or to go there a week before we go back to Delhi.

I had some work done on my résumé, and sent it to a few places. I'll continue with that next week and hopefully something will come up. Many places want to see some code I worked on, and since my old company doesn't publish its code, I'm starting to work on an example app. It something simple, just a simple app that counts. It is stupid as it sounds, but I think it has a potential to work as an example to how I write code and also as a good platform to try new frameworks and tools on. I'll write a more elaborate post about it, but I've started with an app written and designed without any external help of tools like Webpack or frameworks like React or Bootstrap. You can check it out on GitHub or check its code until I get a real post about it.

Have some tips for finding me a new job? Or better, have a remote job to offer? Maybe there's another site I have to see, otherwise I haven't been to India? Have any tips for continuing my trip? Please write me in the comments.

First week in Hampi

On the bus

We have a left Goa, Renana and I are on the way east to Hampi. We planned to go southward to Gokarna, as it should be very beautiful and quiet, but instead we have decided in the last minute that it is time for Hampi.

Every person we asked about Hampi didn't say much, but their dreamy eyes said enough. Hampi is also one of the reasons why I came to India. My brother stayed there for a long time, and his stories always made me want to go there. He told me about Yoga and Rock climbing and it sounded amazing.

After looking for information about the way to Hampi all over the Internet (ok, all over Google) we decided to let go and find our way. I'll try to break it down, so the following generations will be able to find it.

We started by going to Arambol’s bus station. These days it is by the HDFC bank, but just ask about it and people will help you.

From Arambol we took a bus to Mapusa, about 30 minutes. From Mapusa we've taken another 30 minutes' bus to Punjab. Now we're on the bus to Dharwad. We wanted to take a bus to Hubli (or Hubballi) because we know it's a main city on the road to Hampi, but the driver misled us and told us this is the right bus, only after he started driving he said we need to take another bus from Dharwad.

I'll update this after we finish the trip and know the way :-)

We spent a week in Goa, and we stayed only in Arambol. It's a big beach, with many restaurants and guesthouses (and more on the way). I could stay there for a longer time, but since we already left I can tell you that I'm not a beach person. Humidity, sand and salt are not my favorites :)

We arrived in Dharwad and immediately took the bus to Hubli. The bus arrived in Hubli by night time, and we decided to sleep in a hotel there and continue in the morning. We didn't find a good hotel, every one of them was expensive and dirty, but we settled on something and went to sleep.

In the morning we took a bus to Hospet and from there another bus to Hampi.

As much as the road was long and we had to sleep in a dirty hotel, I really enjoyed the way. I didn't feel the hours (about 7 hours on the first day and 5 hours the second one), they passed really quickly. I saw beautiful scenery on the way (no pictures, sorry, we were too focused on the view). I would prefer this road every time versus taking a tourist bus (which always go at night).

So we have arrived to Hampi. I'm writing this passage on Friday, after being 5 days here. And I can already see me staying here for a month. That is what we're planning to do. I'm planning to finish the FCC frontend certificate and start looking for a remote job. I figured that I should start by having something to show, so when I'll finish the certificate I'll start working on my own side project.

Every day I'm sitting for a few hours in the café with my laptop. Working on my blog and FCC. I actually feel like I'm putting more time on my blog than I want, although I don't post much. My day starts with some exercise, yoga, running or acrobalance. Afterwards we're having breakfast and I'm working on my laptop. Then we're taking a trip around.

One day Renana rented a motorbike and we went to a waterfall and a lake that were beautiful. We had to go to the lake as soon as we could because it's a dry season here. The lake gets lower every day because of the lack of rains and the use of its water for the local agriculture. Anyway, we arrived at the lake and it was amazing; you drive on a straight road seeing only glimpses of water hidden behind a wall and when you pass a curve in the road, you suddenly see the whole lake.

We stopped at some spot near the lake and went to watch the sunset. We don't have luck with sunsets and also this time we arrived when the sun had disappeared behind the mountain. But we stayed at the lake for an hour and enjoyed the view. Our bikes were left a few minutes' walk from where we sat and when we were back, we found out someone stole a bottle of gas we left in one of the bikes' trunk. Since there wasn't anything we could do we decided to continue and go back to our guesthouse.

It seemed like luck wasn't on our side and one of the bikes couldn't start. We started pushing it to the nearest village, depressing... After a few minutes three people riding a big bike stopped on our side to offer help. The first thing the driver said to Renana "I know you, you're from my guesthouse". It appears that he's the nephew of our landlord and he has a guesthouse by the lake that he's opening soon (The name of the guesthouse is "The Whispering Rocks". He was on his way to his place when he saw us and decided to help.

They checked the bike and decided we cannot run it. He told us to join the other bikes and they will push the bike. Before we understood what's happening, one of them went on the faulty bike and the others started riding by him, pushing him and helping him to speed. In a few seconds they were far away and we had to run after them. They continued pushing him this way all the way to our guesthouse where we took the bike and thanked them. Everything ended good and now we will remember this as a good experience. I'm really looking forward for him to open his place, so we can come and celebrate with him and offer our help.

Another day I woke up early and went for a run. As always, I let my feet decide where I go and they took me to a farm not far from the village. There was a gate blocking the way, but when asked, the gatekeeper agreed for me to go inside for a run. He explained to me that this is an Ashram, where people have meditation retreats. I ran around the farm, through the rice fields, and arrived to a beautiful river where I saw a group of people meditating on its shore.

My morning run  

Today we went to the other side of the river. We're staying on the Israeli side. It's actually full of tourists from all over the world but you can feel the Israeli vibe here. The main village is on the other side, but in addition to the village there are many temples. We had a short tour in some of the temples and after that we decided to climb up one of the hills. We saw on the hill top a small white temple and we decided to visit it. Climbing wasn't long and there were steps most of the way. And the view was AMAZING.

The hilltop

On the way down we took a different turn from the way up and ended on the other side of the hill. We did a long round tour and ended where we started. On the way, in the entrance of a temple we met this jewelry seller, Babu. He showed us some of his merchandise and told us about his village. He offered to give us a lesson in jewelry making which sounded very interesting, although I think my jewelry making abilities won't be very good.

When he heard we are hungry he offered us a Dhabha (Hindi for restaurant) close to where we sat. We went there and ate "Gobi Rice" as he recommended us to eat. It's fried rice with cauliflower – tasty. The restaurant workers and owner were very excited to have tourists at his place and made a very good meal for us. We will be back to the restaurant next week and I'll have a picture of the place for you.

Queuing in India

8am - Sitting in front of a closed ATM, only two locals with me, the line will get longer as the opening hour gets closer.

Closed ATM in Arambol

There's a money crisis in India, PM Mudy and his government decided to cancel the 1000 and 500 bills because of fraud and their use in the black market. These bills are the most used in the Indian economy, and people are rushing to the banks. The ATMs are only dispensing 2000 rupees (about 100 ₪ or 20$) per a day per person.

As I write, more and more people are coming; I guess we will need to stand in line soon, even though none of us knows if there's a reason for standing.

We, as tourists, also have a problem. We rely on the ATMs, going once a week to withdraw money. Now we need to go every day, and I didn't withdraw once since it began a week ago. I thought it would end by now, so I borrowed some money from a friend and now both of us are in trouble.

For you there at home, don't worry. First there's nothing to do. Secondly we have more options. We eat in restaurants that take credit cards, so we pay some commission, but at least we eat :-)

8.30am - We're about 7 people here. I'm not sure who came for the bank and who came for the ATM. And I'm not sure that the ATM will even open. I decided to wait today until I know something.

We arrived to Goa two days ago, Arambol Beach.

I didn't write for a long time. A combination of no WiFi, tiredness from the driving and the situation and writers block. Fortunately, I need to wait, and I have figured out that I can write on my phone.

I wish I could understand what the people around me are saying. They're probably saying that the ATMs won't be open today.

The way to goa was amazing, putting the current situation aside.  We stayed in Udaipur for two days. It's a very beautiful city and I saw only a fraction of it. We went to see the palace gardens. You can go inside and pay more, but the entrance to the garden is only 30 rupees. It's a very nice building, and behind it we found a “bay” for boats.

You can take one for a ride in the lake and see the city from a different perspective. I guess we missed the last one, because nobody offered us the ride, so I don't know the prices. We even saw a simple boat, and people loading it with fruits and vegetables. Renana decided to offer them our help and to get a ride in return. But they didn't understand our English and were shocked when we started raising the sacks of fruits and loading the boat.

With that failed, we just went for a walk along the water and watch the sunset.

Udaipur

From Udaipur we continued south towards Mumbai. We didn't plan to do it in one day, so we stopped by night at a roadside hotel. We decided not to rush it and wake up when we wake up the next day. So I used this opportunity to wake up early and went for a short run.

I was feeling a little low when we arrived to Mumbai. The cancellation of the bills started at the day we left from Udaipur and you could feel it in the air. The toll booths on the way were packed, and there were huge traffic jams on the way because of that. People were confused about it, some took our old bills, some didn't. We had to pay with credit card for gas, and had to bargain our way to buy lunch and pay for the hotel.

In the end everything is OK, but the way is very consuming.

We stopped in Mumbai mostly to make arrangements. We went to the bank to replace our bills.

I suddenly realized that the ATM is probably empty, otherwise it would be opened, so I guess we have a long time to wait.

Didi and I went to the RTO (regional transport office) to take care of his car registration. We got only information about where he needs to go next time and what he needs, but that’s something.

On Friday night we sat with a friend I met in Leh; he showed us a tiny bit of town. We went for dinner and afterwards to a members' club and visited his house in Mumbai.

Ok, I lost count. There are tons of people here, the bank is supposed to be open in half an hour but nobody knows what about the ATM. Hoping for the best. I hope I won't need to push to get to my place in line.

On the next day we went for a walk and saw that there are slums 5 minutes from where we walked with him. Again the contrasts in India don't fail to surprise me.

Didi had friends that were planning to leave India on Thursday, so we decided to try to get to Goa in one day.

9.30am - I just figured out the ATM is not going to open soon, only the bank. I walked to a different ATM, hopefully this one will be active soon.

The queue in front of the bank

It was a long ride; we traveled with breaks for around 13 hours, but we did it. We saw some marvelous views on the way, but I can't stop feeling like we missed too much by skipping to Goa, and that we should have found a place to stop on the way. Some nice village or another beach.

10am - A policeman started making some order out here, and I see some people walking inside the bank, hopefully it's a good sign.

But since we already here there is no reason to feel anything other than enjoying the sea. We found a nice guest house on the beach, and we have a few friends here, a few friends are coming soon. Many nice restaurants, hopefully many who take cards.

10.15am - The Brinx car just came, it's a small minivan and a guy with a gun walks out of it with the money. I wish I had taken a picture. Hopefully a good sign.

11.15am - An hour later and the ATM is still inactive. There were some activities, like a guy opening the gate and walking inside trying to withdraw money, but it didn't work for him. Just a few minutes ago the bank guard came and looked inside.

Every time there's some action everyone in line is standing up, with hope in their eyes, but we’re still out of knowledge.

At least I can go and have a small samosa to eat. I love samosa.

11.30am - The Brinx van wasn't here to give money, only to take the old bills for burning. Nobody knows when the money will be here.

12.30pm - Rumors everywhere. A guy just said he heard they are going to fill the ATM where I was in the morning by 4 o'clock. I don't know if it's true, or if it means that this ATM is not going to be filled today.

13.53 - Another Brinx van just got here. This time it's money for sure. They are now filling the ATM. Finally!

This is the Brinx car!

14.24 Yeah! I have some money…

JavaScript Calculator or how I try to learn

This post is not a tutorial, just a part of a series of posts about how I think when I try to solve challenges and learn as a programmer.

I decided it’s time to start writing about what I do programming wise. I worked for 3 years, until last August, in a small startup in Herzliya, and like many startups I can’t say too much about it. I worked as a full stack developer, working backend with C#, .NET and front with JavaScript, angular. It was a great experience, I even got the honor to write the first line of code in our solution and many more since. I started working with one guy, and when I left we were already a real company with CEO, CTO and a full team of developers and a QA team. Since I quit I heard the company is doing very well.

I didn’t become a nomad recently, it started a long time ago. I always liked to move around, and working in the company didn’t change that. I arrived to the office once or twice a week, and most of the work I did from home. A home which changed a lot in the last two years, a few months in Tel-Aviv, a few more in Rishpon, Beer-Sheva, and the last few months in Israel I lived in a farm in Gush-Etzion. The last few months I also spent studying in Beer-Sheva, working in Herzliya, staying at Renana’s house in Nitzan and living in the estate (the name we gave our farm). So life before the flight prepared me for this trip, and hopefully life.

But I didn’t want to give you my résumé, I wanted to talk about what I did since then. I started using freecodecamp.com for studying full stack development. Although I already have experience in that, I figured that doing a complete route will give me some insights and lots of experience. I’d actually like to get the backend certificate very much, but I really like to doing things by their order, and since the frontend certificate appears before the backend one, I want to finish this before. It’s also easier for me (although designing and CSS is not my strength) and I do learn a lot. I started building my projects using React and now I know a new framework (or library, depends on your definitions I guess).

I’m already on the last projects, and I have three more projects to finish the certificate. This week I finished the JavaScript Calculator project. I also started hosting my projects in GitHub instead of using CodePen.io, (learning git on the way). You can see the calculator on https://chiptus.github.io/fcc-projects/calculator/ — If you find any bug or if you have other feedback, tell me in the comments.

I want to say a few things regarding using GitHub and git vs. using CodePen.io. First, in CodePen you have three files, one file for each kind: JS, HTML, and CSS. It’s very good for prototyping and writing a simple page. But when your project starts being more complicated, which happens very fast, you’ll want to use git.

First you want to have its version control features, which many, many people praised before me, and if you’re not using them as a developer (either working alone or in a team), then now is the time. Start when you have small projects, I know it feels stupid, but when you understand it (and I still have much to learn) it is wonderful.

Secondly, when working with JavaScript, very fast you’ll want to use a bundler, work with modules and different transpilers. So you want to work with Webpack and npm, you want to add babel, maybe even use TypeScript. And although CodePen lets you use SCSS and Babel, it’s not enough. A simple web app can be a few hundred lines of code, and it can be very confusing to work with one file. On the other hand, building a new environment for each small project can be exhausting or even too much work sometimes, and for these cases CodePen is excellent.

So when you work with GitHub, you control the environment and together with GitHub pages (a feature GitHub gives you to host your own apps on their server — I might write a post about it soon) it’s much easier to work with their platform then with CodePen.io’s one.

So after praising git and GitHub, I want to go back to my calculator. As I said I’m not a designer, and you can see that my calculator is very similar to the one of windows 10. I used their design, and tried to make it work similarly to their calculator.

I used React for the project. React together with bootstrap for the design and I’m going to use font-awesome icons for the buttons’ icons. I’m using bootstrap and font-awesome because they make my life as a developer and not a designer easy. My CSS file is very thin, and I intend on it staying this way.

I chose React because I want to learn it, and in future versions, I might try using Redux or Mobx (which I always confuse with mbox). It’s a very nice experience to write React apps, and although I’m writing simple apps, I can understand the various talks about it simplicity vs. working with Angular 1.

So I started building my app, using some advice I got from the React documentation, and first built my static app, finishing its design as I like. This step you can do with CodePen, and if you didn’t create your Webpack environment, it might be a good idea. I used a pre-built one with Webpack, react, bootstrap, fa, babel (if you read my offline-npm post, I chose the copy paste solution for now, but had and succeeded using cache-min for bootstrap). Raising an environment seems a bit out of context, but there are many tutorials about it (and here is one!).

Ok so this is how I’ve started: bootstrap with the following static html:

Static html

My static calculator

As you see, it still doesn’t do anything, only for show.

And now it’s time to start dividing my app into components. I have the app component of course. As this is a very simple app, it is the only stateful component. All the other components are meant to be only dummy components, meaning they don’t change the state the app handles. The state is the result and a stack which will hold the history of operations, so that it can be displayed, and be calculated at the end.

App.jsx

Output.jsx

Buttons.jsx

The app component is divided into two sub components — output and buttons. I always try (also when using angular 1.5 components) to make my components self-descriptive, meaning that their name will explain what they do. That also means that if I have a complex component that isn’t self-descriptive, then I need to divide it. Actually, very much like using functions.

I can have a button component too, but it’s not so meaningful as it’s only a one liner and html has a button tag so it can be confusing.

That’s it — as you see React is very easy and simple to build a component based app, again as long as you don’t need state — but I still have nothing to show, and this version works exactly like the static one. In the next post I will do the harder part which is to put state into the app.

The beach where I sit while posting this

This post was originally posted on my blog: tdigitalnomad.blogspot.com

On the road - Pushkar to Udaipur - 6-7.11.2016

We just left Pushkar. We're leaving with the car which a friend, Didi, bought and we are heading south. Traveling with a private car is a very different experience from traveling by train or bus, that is what I can tell you after five minutes of being in this car. 

First, you are the master of the way. You can decide when to stop, where and for how long. We are not traveling by night, so we have a few hours of traveling every day (of course we're not waking up at 6 am). I like traveling during the day, because I can see the views India has to offer us. India's driving culture is completely different from what we know in Israel, and you need to feel comfortable enough with it to drive. Fortunately, Didi is this kind of driver. Renana wants to add, that driving the public transportation is very alienated from the street, big busses where you sit above the street or trains that hardly pass through town; a private car is part of the street. We just passed a long street in Ajmer that is full of cars, everyone honking and talking to each other, and we are a part of that. Didi has to push to get forward, needs to know when to honk.

Something which I do miss from driving by local bus is the people. I know I'm repeating myself, but Indians are very curious about tourists and when you walk the street or go up on a local bus, everyone starts to talk with you, asks questions, takes a selfie. It can be very exhausting but also very interesting. Everyone wants to know where I am from, what I do, and to see pictures of my family and Renana (if she's not with me). Most of the times they hardly speak English, and all they can ask is "which country?". But we try to understand each other, and we get to see the differences and, in my eyes even better, the similarities.

Didi is the driver, he bought the car in Parvati and traveled from there to Pushkar. He's a friend from where I live in Israel. Now we are going to Goa, and thinking of doing it slowly, maybe stop in interesting places on the way. (Ideas anyone?) Today we will sleep in Udaipur, stay there for a day or two and continue forward. Udaipur should be beautiful and I hope my hopes are not set too high. It's called The city of lakes, or the white city. 

Last week was the Diwali in India. I celebrated the first day in Jaisalmer and left to Jodhpur on the next day. I actually came there without much patience, because Renana and I were going to meet again in Pushkar on Thursday, so I mostly had that in my mind.  Jodphur was ok (for me), but that was mostly because I didn't prepare enough. Jodhpur is called the blue city and there is a part of the city which is blue, mostly the old city. I didn't know exactly where it was and I booked a hotel on the wrong side of town, thinking (by mistake) that all hotels were in the blue city. My hotel wasn't in the blue city, and I just thought that the small number of houses that were in blue were the reason for this name. 

Just a day before I left to Pushkar someone asked if I saw the blue city and then I realised my mistake. So I had a two days in Jodhpur as a tourist, went to Mehrangarh Fort and The Jaswant Thada mausoleum and to Umaid Bhavan Palace, and of course the blue city. What I really liked to do in Jodhpur was climbing up to the fort, and from there climb a bit more. There's a temple on the mountain peak, with a great view of the desert and the sunset. I went there every evening to see the sunset and think.

We arrived to Pushkar just a few days before the camel festival. It's a huge festival to which many camel owners come with their herds, to show and of course to sell. It's a big celebration, with four ferris wheels (I just learned this word :P). It also means that Pushkar is full of people and the guesthouses prices rise. Rise to a point that many Israelis including us are leaving. Pushkar is one of the tourist places in India that are full of Israelis, and even though I'm looking for quiet places I felt the need to visit it. It's one of the holy cities for Hindus and a site for pilgrimage. 

There's a big difference between how I feel that holy places should look and how the Hindus feel about it. You can see this contrast in Pushkar. The main site in Pushkar is its lake, with many pilgrims walking around the lake barefoot, bathing and having different Puja ceremonies. At the same time, the lake is very dirty and you see many cows, dogs and pigeons walk (or fly) around, doing their business everywhere and nobody cares. A few meters from the lake you find Pushkar's huge market. I grew up learning that holiness comes with cleanness and India surprised me in that aspect.

We slept in Pushkar for four days, one day to rest, and three days of shopping. I didn't see much of the city other than the market and the lake. The lake is very beautiful at first glance, and from far , because its shores are all built into big white steps that go into the lake. But as I mentioned, once you start walking on its shores you start seeing all the dirt and cow poo everywhere. 

Savitri Temple is recommended. It's situated on the hill top above Pushkar and you can walk all the way to the top or take the cable car. We took the cable car, it was 90 rupees both ways and very nice. The cable car stops for about 30 seconds while in air to let you enjoy the view, we weren't prepared so it was a bit alarming, but afterwards I saw the signs telling us about it and we relaxed and really enjoyed it. 

On the last two days we got to make many good friends in Pushkar, in a restaurant called The Koala. Great food, great deserts, magical lassi ;). I suggest Thali Pinukim – Pinukim is a Hebrew word meaning treats – and the portion is served in a thali dish with each part of the dish filled with ice cream or chocolate syrup and as chapatti you get very fluffy pancakes. You have to taste to know. We really enjoyed sitting there and came back more than one time. 

Will continue updating from the road. See you on the next post.

Tutorials - Doing them while offline

 

I'm in Jodhpur, Rajasthan, in the middle of a war. It's Diwali here; the holiday should represent the winning of light over darkness, but I guess the people are thinking the war is still going on.

My shelter is a room in a guesthouse without a name; it was just opened, but I think it has very good view of town. It sits on a cliff, very close to the fort  Mehrangarh Fort and Jaswant Thada. While hiding, my heart jumps with every boom, I thought of the subject for my next post. I have been doing a lot of programming tutorials in the past month, and most of the time I didn't have an internet connection.

This situation calls for a bit of preparation.

First, I need to choose the tutorials in which I am interested. Whether it's a blog I am reading, or post in Hashnode, or maybe some package documentation. Every tutorial that seems interesting to me, I try to save it as a PDF. Hashnode is gives some problems, but most blogs print well. And If I'm printing from GitHub, there's a site called gitprint.com – you can simply change the domain from github.com to gitprint.com. It prints GitHub documentation very well. If you can print it, you can print it to PDF. Chrome has this ability built-in, I don't know about other browsers, but if not, you can download Foxit and it will add a pdf printer to your printers.

After saving the tutorials as PDF, I try checking what online stuff every tutorial needs. First, download everything that is needed for this tutorial – e.g. npm packages, script files. Now if the app that we build using the tutorial needs to do some online requests (e.g. using some online API), we have two options. Wait to do the tutorial until I have any connection. Or try and figuring the scheme of the response, and make a small webserver that will handle our requests – but most of the time this is just too much work and I prefer to wait.

Of course, any tutorial stands by itself, and you need to figure out what to do. But these steps occur on most tutorials I do – print to pdf and download npm packages.

Short post for today,

Happy Diwali!

Camel Safari in Jaisalmer

Ok, so what did we have this week? Jaipur, Bikaner, Jaisalmer. Jaipur with Raj, seeing the city and local life. Bikaner with its forts and rat temple, and Jaisalmer, a city straight from Aladdin.

I left Jaipur on the 24^th and arrived at Bikaner at 11pm, going straight to the hotel I booked earlier. I have something to say about sites like booking.com, it's very hard to decide on a hotel based only on reviews of people you don't really know. You don't know what the numbers are compared to. Did the people making the reviews have a look at the different hotels in the same city/area before they booked? Is it important to them to have a clean room? The rates are very subjective, and although the final rate is based on everyone, it still doesn't tell you much. Is an 8 rated hotel in one city the same as an 8 rated hotel in some other city? Which rooms of the hotel did they see?

For instance, I went to the Jamna Niwas guest house, it's rated good (7.5) on booking.com. The written reviews were very positive and I decided to book it for one night. Arriving there, I got a room without windows, which was very dirty and with a strange tunnel between all the rooms under and above my room. I woke up at 8am, thinking it was the middle of the night (no windows), and hearing sounds from other rooms as if the people were in my room. Very strong TV sounds. I couldn't understand why someone would turn the TV so loud in the middle of the night. Looking on my phone I figured it was already morning, and I'm missing the sun.

After trying to change a room without luck, I decided to go to another hotel. The other hotel I checked was very nice, it wasn't based on Booking.com, but it was recommended by one of the Jamna Niwas staff, and I'm really happy to have made the decision. A bit farther away from the center, but still not so far, and very quiet and spacious. It had a nice rooftop and nice garden. And a very nice coffee shop nearby. The guesthouse is called Chandra Niwas. After that, and after checking some more places I decided it's time for me to rest. I took the rest of the day in the hotel, to eat, sit at my computer, watch some shows. I even found a nice park across the street, where I could go for a short run.

I didn’t run since I'd been in Amsterdam (almost 2 months ago), and it was amazing. I'm a barefoot runner, which means that I'm mostly running without shoes. I love the feeling of earth under my feet, I also almost never suffer from aches afterwards. Well this time is was one of those almost never, I guess that I have time to get back in shape.

I woke up the next day at 5am, right in time to catch the train to Deshnok. It's a little village situated 30 KMs from Bikaner. The attraction in Deshnok is a temple called Karni Mata (there's also one in Bikaner, so don't be confused), or the rats' temple. On the floors of the temple you can find an estimated number of 20000 rats walking freely, eating from big bowls of food the pilgrims left them.

Actually there wasn't much to see. The temple is nice, but after walking a few minutes, barefoot in the middle of a swarm of rats, I wanted to leave already. It was definitely an experience, not sure if good or bad :) I stayed at Deshnok for about 1 hour, taking the local bus to Bikaner.

Taking local busses is always a good experience (for now). The locals are very nice, and always curious to meet a stranger. They ask many questions, and they are very welcoming and warm. This time, they sat me in the front by the driver, one was asking me questions and one was translating for the rest of the bus, passing my answers to the next guy. I felt like in some interviewing show.

The bus dropped me in the city and I went to see Junagarh Fort; it's where the king (or maharajah) of Bikaner used to live until the beginning of the 20^th century when he moved to Lalgarh Palace just a few kilometers away. Like other forts/palaces in Rajasthan it is very majestic and well done. You have a route inside the fort that you follow. A guide is mandatory, but our guide only spoke Hindi, so I walked mostly alone. I recommend it very much.

I planned to go on the same day to Lalgarh Palace and even to Gajner lake and palace. A guy from Bikaner I met on the train to Bikaner recommended me these places. But when I finished my tour in Junagarh, I was very tired after waking up so early, so I went back to my hotel and had a siesta. When I woke up most things were closed, so I had to give up on them.

The day after I left for Jaisalmer. The golden city. The city is situated in the Thar desert. In the middle of the city you can find a big fort, in which, unlike in Jaipur and Bikaner, you can actually find hotels and houses. A lot of the houses in Jaisalmer are very beautiful, finely sculptured. Every house looks like a small palace. The day I arrived, after watching the desert sunset, I went for a walk in the city, got a little lost in the streets of it and saw many admirable houses.

I totally recommend coming to Jaisalmer, much more than the other Rajasthan cities I have been . The environment is very relaxing, and the desert wind is so comforting.

The guest house I booked, Tofu Safari, was very surprising. The room costs 90 rupees, and I read good reviews on it and said, ok, it's 90 rupees, something like 1$, worst case I just go to a different hotel. The hotel entrance looks like an entrance to Aladdin's palace, and you get inside to a very clean and spacious lobby. My room missed the AC that was promised, but a fan is good for me, and it was very clean and big. Hot water was only available in a bucket, but it so hot here, you don't really need it.

I booked for the next day a camel safari tour through Tofu, the owner of the guest house.  I joined a group of tourists that booked the safari with him. We left at the afternoon of the next day, taking a jeep ride to the national park where the riding took place. On the way we stopped at a ghost town, a small deserted town where they take all the tourists there. We took some pictures and went on with the tour.

It was nice riding the camels, for a few minutes, afterwards you just want the camel to move faster, or to go down and walk beside it. The tour took us to somewhere in the dunes of the desert, where we made camp for the night. We sat and watched the sunset; Afterwards we ate thali for dinner and sat together watching the bright stars, drinking beer delivered to us cold from a nearbyvillage. I don't think I ever saw so many stars. It was a very cold night. Even though I was ready and brought warm clothes, I woke up many times and I was very happy to see it end.

After a short breakfast, we went back on the camels. Well most of us did, I decided to do what I said before and walk with the camels. They walk slowly, so it was very easy. About one and a half hours walk and we arrived to the village from which we started the day before, packed our stuff on the jeep and left back to Jaisalmer.

Tomorrow is Diwali, it's an indian holiday celebrated by many religions, each one has a different meaning, but it all comes down to shooting many fireworks in the air. They already started with that a month ago when we were in Daramshala, and tomorrow is the main day. I'll stay here for a few more days, after that I will continue to Jodphur.