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.

Offline use of NPM

Jaisalmer, Rajasthan

A somewhat technical post for those of you who are using NPM:

A problem I get a lot when traveling is the use of NPM for downloading packages to build my projects. Now, for new packages I never used I can understand that there's a problem because I don't expect the entire NPM repository to be on my computer.However I often use bootstrap for different projects and I don't want to wait for it to download each time. What's more, I can't download it without an internet connection and thus I'm missing work time because I miss bootstrap.

This is what I tried:

1.      Hacking a bit:

Go to a repository that already has bootstrap and copy the folder from node_modules folder. You need to remember also to copy the line stating the dependence from that repository package.json file.

It works really good when I try to do it with simple packages like bootstrap. But what happens if I want to do it for React or Webpack? They rely on other packages, and I need to know which ones. These can be 100s of packages, it's a lot of work to start a new project.

I can just have a base repository that I duplicate every time, but what's the fun of this?

2.      Using "NPM –cache-min 99999999 install <package>"

This would force NPM to load from the cache. A few problems:

1.       NPM will still connect to the registry if there's a package with dependencies that are not in the cache.

2.       It will fail in case of downloading a package which has dependencies on a newer version than one in the cache.

3.      Local-NPM

I found a program called local-NPM (https://github.com/nolanlawson/local-NPM), you're more than invited to use it on your projects. It's unmaintained, but it seems like it's working.

Its use includes running a local proxy server, and NPM downloads the packages from it instead of downloading it from the NPM registry. If the package you're looking for is not available in the proxy it will download it from the NPM registry and save it there.

You can use the instructions on the GitHub page or you can read this blogpost https://addyosmani.com/blog/using-NPM-offline/ by a guy named Addy Osmani. It's his first post I read, but many thanks to him for writing of this solution. Note what it says on GitHub regarding to the use of a temporary .npmrc file.

4.      Yarn and big-bertha

The same day I started writing this post, a guy in my FCC cohort group (FCC Rhinos! :)) told us about a new package manager developed by Facebook. It's called Yarn and it should fix some problems they had with NPM. It fixes some security issues, and should also be faster. It does work with the NPM registry, not using a new one, so any package installable with NPM is also installable with Yarn. It also supports offline installation. I still didn't manage to use it very well. Fromwhat I understand, my internet connection is too slow and thus Yarn hangs up in the middle of the installation.

An NPM package "big-bertha" (https://github.com/joshmatz/big-bertha) comes along just to add commonly used packages to your cache so you can install them offline. You just run "yarn add big-bertha && yarn remove big-bertha" in your cmd and you're good to go. For some reason even though I did run it before successfully (with an internet connection), I can't install it again offline. I will need to check it and I'll update you.

It seems like the same solution as npm –cache-min, and it's probably suffering from the same problems. I'll need to dig into these solutions more.

Ok, so I didn't find a very good solution, I will continue to look for one and update you when I find or if one of the former solutions does work eventually.

Do you know of anything else I can do? Please tell me about it in the comments or on my blog.

Having fun with Raj in Jaipur

Ok, I'm stopping my flow of the way to tell you what happened today. I've arrived to Jaipur yesterday morning. It's the capital city of Rajasthan state, pink colors, lots of markets, lots of jewelry, lots of traffic, mess everywhere.

We have been warned, about the drivers and merchants that try to rip you off, and that you should take care and bargain for everything, drop their proposed price to 25-30%. All of that didn't prepare for what happened J We got off the bus (night bus, slept for about 2-3 hours of the 12 hours' drive) and since we he heard it's very hard to find many guesthouses in the same place, I already knew where I want to go.

I met some new friends on the night bus and we all rented a rickshaw to the hotel. Of course we were tired, so he took more money than needed, but we only wanted to leave our stuff somewhere and we did. We took a room at Heiwa Inn for the night, left our stuff and went for a little tour of the city. Again, we took a rickshaw to town, and left it at the City Palace. From there we went for a walk around the city. We saw the Hawa Mahal, it used to be the women's palace – or more precisely, it's the name of the wall of windows where the women of the royal family could watch street activities without being seen - and then went to breakfast.

After breakfast my friends decided to walk to the market, and I went back home by foot. On the way, lots of rickshaw drivers stopped me, trying to start a conversation to get me to ride with them. I ignored most of them, but one driver caught my attention and we started talking. He told me he is a musician, and driving is only his way of getting away from boredom, while he waits for the next festival or gig. He's playing in different places in the world, and in India. We continue talking and he shows me pictures of him in Paris, France, of gigs in the streets of Paris, and of festivals he's been to.

When we ended talking, he still hasn't offered a ride or tour in town, but he did ask me if I like beer, because he wants to invite me to his house, play some music with me and have a beer. Of course I said yes, but tomorrow, because now I have to sleep. So he gave me his number to talk later, and offered me a ride to the hotel. I figured it will happen, and actually my battery went empty, so I couldn't use maps.me to find to the hotel, so I joined him for the ride. When we arrived the hotel, I took out a bill of 100 rupees, and he was surprised to get it. He took after I argue with him, and that is only, as he said, to make me feel comfortable.

After a few hours of sleep, dinner in the Peacock restaurant – very elegant restaurant, not so expensive like I expected – we talked on WhatsApp and arranged to meet in the morning, to have a tour of the city, again, Raj (the driver) only wanted to invite me to his house in the evening, but I offered to have the tour. In the morning I have decided to move to another guesthouse, because my friends left for Delhi, and I found a place with shared dorms. The place is called Hathroi Palace and it's very nice, much more travelers friendly. Anyway I met a new friend, Chemi, on the guest house's rooftop restaurant and invited him to join the tour with me.

Chemi and I met Raj outside the guesthouse and we started the tour. Raj decided the tour will go from Amer Fort, to the elephant village and from there we'll see. On the way we stopped to drink Lassi, the Indian yoghurt drink, on Lassi Walla. Very good lassi, you drink it out of a clay cup that you dispose afterwards. I guess it's more ecological than using plastic cups, just seem like a waste of work, no?

Raj dropped us on the outskirts of the fort, and we decided to meet in an hour. The fort is very amazing. Every time I see something this big that was built so long ago (about 1500 AC) I'm amazed how they done it. All these details and overwhelming size…  Note that the fort, and other places in Jaipur have a student discount, so take your student's card.

Amer fort

Next place was the elephants' village. It's where they treat the domestic elephants of this region. You can all sorts of activities with the elephants, like riding, feeding, petting and some bizarre like painting the elephant. The whole show of the people was that they are part of a cooperative that treats the animals, and takes care of them, and that the money is used only for that and not for commercial use. On the other hand, I didn't really understand what is the use of that and why can't the animals just leave in a nature. I don't think that drawing on the animals is a very good treatment of them.

We decided not to do anything there, but sit there and watch the elephants on their rest. It's was very interesting experience, very relaxing. We had some pictures and after some more talking with the guys there we decided to give them some money. The Jaipuri people know very much how to make you feel bad for them and give them your money. I don't really like that feeling, and unfortunately, I regret coming there.

We left and went on our way to lunch. On our way we stopped on a promenade along a big lake. In the middle of the lake sits a big palace, without any way from the land into it. This is the water temple, Jal Mahal.  This used to be a palace for some king, but today it's empty and you can only take picture of it and it's not open for visitors. Very beautiful and the promenade is nice too.

From there we went to lunch in a local restaurant. Very tasty, I don't know the name, and without Raj we wouldn't find it anyway. We took us to some jewelry factory to see how they work. It's a very dirty complex, where people live and work at the same time. Like in every other work place, children are walking around, the sewage running free. And at the second floor is a very elegant, rich, western store selling jewelry.

This was the last stop of the tour, and from there we went to Raj's place. We bought some beers on the way and stopped by a very dirty, big and poor building complex. When Raj told me about himself, and invited me to his house I expected some apartment building, something a bit western, I don't know. But this was the poor quarters of the city. A maze of buildings, every house is built on another. Very interesting to see, and an experience I never expected to have.

We entered the maze, everyone welcoming us, asking for our name, and waving. All the children running behind us, very excited to see strangers. We enter a small apartment, no doors, no windows, big TV. On the top floor we met Raj's wife and children, cooking dinner on a small fire place. We sat in a room, and Raj turned on the light by connecting two wires to each other, nothing safe :)

Anyway, the point of this post was to introduce you to Raj, that you know there's at-least one rickshaw driver that is very nice and trustworthy in Jaipur. Also to those of you who know some interesting festivals that Raj maybe able to play in, it will be a lot of help to him if you can it arrange for him. I promised him to open him a Facebook page so he can post his videos and pictures.

This is his contact information and you're more than welcome to contact him if you need. I will update this when we have a Facebook page ready.

whatsapp: +919829969237

mail: narenderbhatt2001@yahoo.com

Tomorrow I meet him to buy some train tickets, and maybe come for a meal at his place, he's cooking :) Oh, when the day ended, each of us gave him 1000 rupees, he didn't want to take them, although I'm more than sure he could take much more. He's worth it.

On the train to Rishikesh, October 19, 2016

The noise is deafening; I'm taking the night train from Amritsar to Rishikesh and the windows have to be open otherwise it gets too smelly in here. Renana and me decided to have our first train experience in the sleeper class and I don't regret it (for now, we're less than an hour on the train). Indian trains have so many different classes, you can read about it here. The sits are cozy, there's a nice sikh family beside me. Renana is already asleep and I decided to take the time to write.

Last time I wrote I was in Dharamshala, sick in my guesthouse. I got better since. Renana twist her ankle on the trail from Dharamkot to Bhagsu (Two villages near Dharamshala, where most tourists go), but she's much better now. We decided to leave from Dharamshala a few days later, and continue southward to Rajastan. Dharamshala was very nice and beautiful, but I will always remember mostly that I was sick there. I almost didn't have any powers to write or study, not to talk about going to courses in the villages or take a hike to the places around. I do regret it, but when I felt like moving forward I decided to do it.

We did have a few days that we did feel good, so I took some yoga classes and Renana did some meditation. I took the yoga class with the same teacher as before, Bijay Vasudev, and Renana went to a Meditation center called Tushita. It's a Tibetan center located on the outskirts of Dharamkot, on the way to McLeodGanj, the village where the Dalai Lama and his followers live. Tushita is doing meditation classes every day, you can just come and participate.

We went to McLeodGanj one day, we visited the Tibetan museum and the temple they built there, very impressive. There is a small market there, lots of Tibetan art and food.

people passing a railway when the barrier is closed

So Tuesday morning we took the government bus to Amritsar. It wasn't a direct one, we took a bus from McLeod to Pathankot, and the minute we got there we went up the next bus to Amritsar. For those of you who's interested, there's one bus from McLeod to Amritsar which leaves at 4:50am, otherwise you have to do what we did which was to take a bus to Pathankot and switch there to Amritsar. It's not so bad, because the "direct" one does go through Pathankot, and there's a bus from Pathankot every few minutes. The way takes about 6-7 hours, depends on the road and on how much the driver wants to stop. Our driver took his time and did a few long breaks on the way.

Amrtisar is one of the holy cities for the sikh religion, and in the center of the city you can find the golden temple. The temple is a place for worship for sikh around the world, and you can find many pilgrims doing their way into the temple. Around the temple there are few hostels for pilgrims, and there's also a place for foreigners. It's a room full of beds, but you can sleep there for free (Based on donations) and you can leave your bags there – you also get a locker for your stuff. We decided to do it.

We have arrived at about 6pm to Amritsar and went straight to the temple. We found the hostel in one of the side entrances to the temple, checked-in, left our stuff and went for a walk to eat something. We ate something called Aloo Parantha, you can find it anywhere in India, and it's a Pita bread stuffed with mashed potato. We went for a walk around the temple, but didn't enter as we left it for the morning, we were too tired for it, so we went to sleep. Sleeping in a room full of strangers was better than expected and we fell asleep almost immediately, we did wake up every now and then, but, again, less than expected.

We had a very early morning, waking up at about 7am when the guard turned the lights on. We went for a walk inside the temple. Well the temple is actually a very big square which is surrounded by a big white building and a few more building, some of them are small places for prayer, others libraries, there is also a community kitchen in which we ate our breakfast. It's a very big and efficient community kitchen, and all the people who come to visit are invited to join, they were really happy that we came. It's a very nice experience, we went inside and received our spoon, a plate and a bowl for water. The guard points you into a big hall where everyone sits in line and gets their meal.

It's very hard to tell how nice this experience is, sitting with people from all classes, on the floor and eating your Daal (Indian lentils dish) with rice and Chapati (Indian bread). You get just enough food, and you can always ask for a refill. After that you go to give your plate back, and that's where all the magic happens. You have an option to put a donation, and then you have an option to volunteer in the kitchen. We decided to go with the donation, but it was amazing to see hundreds of people, peeling vegetables, washing dishes, and doing everything very efficiently, taking care of the people that come after them.

The temple is very big and impressive. The buildings are surrounding a huge pool of water and in the middle of that pool is the golden temple. It really is golden. We didn't go inside as there were lots of people there, but just walking around, seeing all the writing on the walls, and the symmetries on the floor, hearing the prayers reading from their holy books was a really nice experience.

After the temple we went to the train station to buy tickets to Jaipur for me and a ticket to Rishikesh for Renana. Since we wanted to travel most of the way together, the tickets guy persuaded us to buy tickets to Rishikesh. He promised me that there are many trains from there, which there aren't.

There's a soldier in the coach that is telling me I need to go to sleep, I'm not sure if he's worried about me or about my computer, my Hindi is not so strong :) I'll continue when we arrive to Rishikesh. 

Dharamshala, October 11th 2016

I'm sick. One of the worst things to be when you're traveling is sick. I mean I wanted to do so much here, I wanted to learn yoga and see Dharamshala and its area. But all I do is lie in bed and wait to get better.

View from our guesthouse in Dharmkot

We are here for already 6 days, we arrived by night bus from Bhuntar, which is at the end of Parvati Valley, just where it meets Kullu valley. It took us something like 7 hours including breaks and one police search. (Police didn't find anything, just made some mess). The way was curvaceous and the driver didn't mind that, so we didn't really sleep.

I'm not sure about other tourists, but Israeli tourists are staying mostly in two villages around Dharamshala, one is Bhagsu and the second is Dharamkot. We didn't really know a lot about the area or where we can find an open guesthouse, so we went with the flow and arrived to Dharamkot with everyone from our bus. Nothing was open and we realized that everyone is basically like us, they have no idea where to find a place to stay. Luckily for us, someone (who was leaving) ordered a taxi, and the taxi driver had a guesthouse to give us a room in. It wasn't the best guesthouse but it was mostly quiet and clean and we decided to stay there for the weekend, until we had rested and started to understand what goes around in this place.

On the first day, Renana didn't feel so good, so she rested and I stayed with her to work on the blog. I opened it on Google's blogspot platform, and started uploading the posts I wrote from Parvati, and sent the link to a few people.

When I started writing, I thought I'd name the blog "The traveling programmer", but the domain is caught, and I went with "The digital nomad", I like the taste of this name, but I'm not completely sure.

What do you think? I thought also of "The programming traveler" or "Programmer on the road". Can you think about something else?

I also started working on FCC's weather app project. It should be very easy for me, but when I upload it to CodePen everything starts to mess up. First of all, I need to get the user's location, and on the localhost everything works well, but when you work in CodePen (or any other remote domain), chrome blocks location requests from non-secured connections. Meaning I need to use CodePen's https domain. But then I can't make non-secure requests to other domains, meaning I need to use OpenWeatherMap secure domain, but it works only for paying members, so I can't use that unless I pay.

So I started using DarkSky API, which gives SSL requests for free, but It doesn't give the city from where you are requesting, so I need to use some geolocation service, but then why do I need to use the html5 geolocation service? And if I'm not using it, why do I need to use CodePen's https domain? And then all this trouble I went with changing to DarkSky was redundant.

I left the weather app with that, and finished working on my blog.

Renana started to feel good in the evening, and my throat started aching in the morning. At first it wasn’t so bad and we went to Yoga that day. It's an Indian teacher called Sanjay who works with another Israeli teacher (Noam), they both give lessons at a place called "Nature Valley". If you ever come to Dharamkot, After Om Café, you take a left and start going up the stairs, there's a little temple after a few stairs and Nature Valley's entrance is like one meter before the temple on the right. It's a big tent on the roof of a building.

The Yoga was Hatha yoga, I don't know if that's the meaning but it felt a bit too hippy for us. A lot of prayers, and on the meditation in the end he rubbed some oil on our forehead, which wasn't very comfortable for me. But at least we tried. It was very nice to do yoga at last, and I'm looking forward to the next time.

The throat ache got worse day by day, and I found myself in bed all day, trying to sleep. I don't have a fever so I figured it's mostly my need to sleep good (which I didn't). Yesterday I started eating fresh garlic, and I hope it will help. I'll let it for a few more days, and if I feel the same I will go to a doctor. Today I finally woke up not so tired, but we'll see what happens later :) 

So as you understand I don't have much to write about. Because of the sickness I wasn't in a mood to write or do anything interesting around here. Hopefully I'll have something to write about in the weekend.

What I can tell you about is the weird weather (well weird for me). When the sun is out, it's very hot, but that can change in a matter of seconds. The second the sun is behind a cloud - it gets very cold. Yesterday I woke to the sound of rain on the roof. Heavy rain. Renana just went to buy us something to eat (Sabikh, it's probably not originally from Israel, but it's a dish we eat there, basically egg and eggplant in pita – She bought it from a place called dudu falafel in Bhagsu, very good). So it was raining heavy rain, but the sun was shining and it was very hot. Renana came back after a few minutes and while I was eating my sabikh, it started hailing. It was very weird this rain and hail with the sun, and we really enjoyed it.

Tonight starts Yom Kipur, it's a day when Jews believe that God forgives them for their sins and it's also time to forgive each other for the wrongs we did. I believe that every day can be this day, but I'll use the opportunity to say sorry to everyone I wronged and hurt.

Gmar Chatima Tova.

Tosh, September 30th, 2016

Sitting in a cozy room, full of cushions and low tables, very common in India's guesthouses. The guest house, Sky Star, in Tosh, still in Parvathi, is sitting on the very high hills of Tosh. We got here to meet two friends from Israel who promised us the view of our life. They didn't lie.

The view from our guest house

We arrived here after a walk of 6 hours from Khir-Ganga. Khir-Ganga is the name of a place in the mountains which have hot springs. We went there and thought we would find a village, but instead we found a group of restaurants that rent their space during the night, for the tourists who come to enjoy the hot springs. There are no roads there, the only way to get there is by foot. We started walking at 10am in the morning and arrived by 18 in the evening, right in time to enjoy the hot springs in the sunset.

It was a hard walk. We took the wrong turn at the beginning, and climbed the wrong mountain. After a while we realized that and walked back. This mistake cost us two hours, but in India time is not money. Well, maybe it is, but everything is so cheap. So we went back, almost to the beginning, and started walking the right path. It took us about 4 hours from there. On the way we met many tourists like us who made this walk. One who sat on a rock on the side, playing his dij, a few friends we knew from before, a few friends we made on the way.

One of the main problems I confront as a developer on the way, is working without internet. A lot of villages are off the grid, some even without electricity, so I can't talk about internet. Here, in Tosh, we don't have internet, so I need to decide what to do. Most of the time I just decide to enjoy myself and don't do anything. But if I want to work, I need to think a bit creatively, because many things require a connection, documentation, package managers, etc. Even sometimes you just want connection to get some muse. So there is a need to improvise and getting things ready beforehand.

My current project will be to open a blog and start uploading these posts to it. It's very hard to do it without an internet connection, because you don't want to open a blog from zero, but you mostly use an existing platform that gives you the content management and discussion forum. Since the blog idea came to my head I didn't have a connection, I only write. I might sit tomorrow on the designing, and that's it.

Acrobalance at Pangong

When we arrived to Khir-Ganga, after a long walk, we decided to go straight to the spring. The village is on the side of the mountain, the spring is the highest point in the village, and on the way to it there're a lot of restaurants, which act as guesthouses at night. We got to the spring and outside are sitting like 8 friends that we've met when we were in Ladakh. We went with them on a trip to Nubrah Valley and Pangong lake. Both are main attractions for tourists in Leh, very very beautiful and very recommended. Pangong is a lake that sits on the border between India and China, at 4500 meters above sea level. We stayed at the lake for a night, got there late and left at around 10 in the morning. So we saw the sun rising and it was very beautiful, but I think a perfect visit to the lake should be for at least a day, to see the lake at all the hours of the day.

So we met again our friends from Ladakh in the middle of nowhere. Washing in the spring is separated, the men are sitting in the open space and the women are sitting inside a room. So I sat with my friends and enjoyed the hot water. The air is cold, it was even raining on us at the end of the walk, so you can understand the feeling we had. It was amazing.

We woke up in the morning and had breakfast, and we started walking to Tosh. It's a long way down, and then a walk on the other side of the river until the dam of Barisiani, from there you need to climb the road until Tosh. Our guest house is the highest (for now) in the village, which means another 30 minutes' climb, but totally worth it.

Another suggestion I have for travelers, is the app Maps.me, it's an offline map, full of details. Both trails from Kalga to Khir-Ganga and from Khir-Ganga to Tosh are on the map, and a lot of guesthouses and restaurants appear on the map. We were in a village called Turtuk in Ladakh, which is completely in the middle of nowhere, electricity once a day between 19 to 23, but our guesthouse was mapped. You download the map, then choose the zone that you need; for example, I downloaded the India map, which is about 500 MB, and now I have all these without any internet connection.

That's it for today, in two days it's Rosh Hashana, the first day of the jewish year. I will probably find time to work on the blog by then.

Kalga, September 28th, 2016

I’m sitting now in the village of Kalgha, writing the first page of the blog. My girlfriend is sitting by my talking with a friend she met today. That’s the thing about India, you meet every day new people, and about Israelis, they always know a few common people. We arrived here from Kasol, the capital of the Parvati valley, Himachal Paradesh, India. We arrived in a local bus to Birisiani, and had a 40 minutes' walk from Birisiani to here. The ride in the bus was one of the terrifying rides I had. The road is a one-way road most of the way, if it’s even paved. Every jump the bus made felt like we are going to fall to the great depth.

We are residing in the Blue Star guest house. It’s managed by a small family, they have a building which is the guest house with their house, and a small restaurant on the side. There is no road to here, but somehow they have everything here. Two huge speakers, a computer, a stove, electricity. We were wondering how they brought it and other stuff to here.

It’s interesting to see how these people live, there’s a big clash between civilizations here, not only between the tourists and the locals, but also between the locals themselves. Most of them are used to living without any electricity or any other technology, but now they have electricity and smartphones and 4G internet.

My girlfriend, Renana, and I are travelling for one month now, and I was traveling about 3 weeks before. I worked in a small start-up in Herzliya, Israel and studied Math in Ben-Gurion University in the Negev; I finished my degree and left my job to travel. We landed in Madrid and took a train south to Cadiz, we rented a car and rode to Idaha Nova in Portugal for the Boom festival. It’s a seven days' festival of psychedelic trance (we also enjoyed the after party of 3 days in the north of Portugal). I met my girlfriend in Amsterdam after the festival and afterwards we took a flight to Delhi, India through Moscow.

Before Kasol we were in Leh for 2 weeks, and Manali for a week. We also were in Delhi for 4 days, but there is not so much to mention about it. We slept in Pahar-Ganj (Main Bazar in tourist lingo) and what I mostly remember is the smell, I am not really sure whether it’s just a memory or if my clothes are still smelling from it. My suggestion for future travellers is to spend a bit more money in Delhi and sleep somewhere else. There are no words to express my disgust of this place. It can be an experience to walk there for a few hours, but nothing more.

Leh is a different thing, Leh is a city that is placed in Jammu and Kashmir state in the north, in the Ladakh district. Its height is about 3.5 km above sea level, and the residents are less Indians and more Tibetans. Everyone is smiling and the air is clean. It can be very cold in the nights, but very beautiful and very very chill.

I can tell a lot about Leh and Ladakh, but that’s for a different time.

Tomorrow we’re going to Khir ganga, it’s a village higher in the mountains, about 4-5 hours walk from here. The main reason to go there (other than the beauty) is the hot springs. I’m not really sure what’s going to be out there, but I’ll wait and see...