Impressions of India: 12
I’m currently travelling for 3 months in India, through Goa, Kerala and Rajasthan, with a pretty hot and hectic schedule of boutique hotel reviews. The galleries below are my online photojournalist diary of scenes caught, people met and things found along the way. I hope you enjoy the journey as much as I did and am still.
Please do take a moment to log and/or e-mail me your reactions and comments? Given the slow upload speed, each post takes around 3 hours straight to get online (not counting image-selection and -editing time), and knowing that lots of you are reading and enjoying it will add great fuel to my fire.
It's a shame they started the parade just as dusk was falling, and that I was really quite ill, or I could have done the great spectacle even more justice.
Lots of brightly-coloured, spotlit, loudspeakered floats of gods and goddesses (one was even stabbing himself in the stomach, with lots of red paint and roaring), men in lungis doing a flower-pot-on-the-head dance, a lion riding a swan, pot-bellied, slick-with-greasepaint tigers, a human dumbo, and a permanently-unimpressed Kathakhali dancer - they all kept making me smile and laugh.
This mother and daughter asked me to take a snap of them with their instammatic pocket camera and, they looked so lovely in their saris, I took one with my own camera too.
As I returned to the Temple Beach, leaving the parade to continue making its (very slow) progress around town, night had well and truly fallen. But the street lights were shining brightly onto the beach, so I fired off a couple of hand-held, without-flash shots - at 1/3 of a second. They're inevitably a little blurry, but I like their mood and almost abstract-painting feel.
Posts still to come before we're up-to-date:
A train, 2 planes and a sleeper bus, from Varkala in Kerala to Jaisalmer in Rajasthan
One musical, 1 contemporary, 1 suddenly-abandonned, and 2 Stone Age-style villages in the Thar Desert
Magical Jaisalmer Fort
Fantastically festive! how magical to be there.
ReplyDeletehello you,
ReplyDeletejust looked at the new blogs. they're totaly brillant. the capures are just right not too wordy yet very descriptive.
The pictures are great,and looking at them i can smell the place, so cool!xx Laurence
Amazing. I wish some bloke would balance a pot of flowers on his head for me. Seriously, that's incredible carnival. Lucky you for being there.
ReplyDeleteWow this knocks the socks of the Notting Hill carnival!
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