Bombay was the final stop on our trip to India. Still recovering from food poisoning, we took a flight from Kochi to the megapolis. We spent a lot of our time in Bombay with our friend Priya, whose place we also stayed at. She took us to lots of street food (and other) places, which was challenging since we were still recovering and not feeling all too great. Yet, we were glad to explore new dishes we hadn’t tried or not even heard of before. Bombay definitely felt cleaner, more modern and also more Western than Delhi or most of the other places we’d prior visited.

Leaving Rajasthan, we took a bus to Ahmedabad. We had a flight to Kochi the following day and only had about half a day to spend in Ahmedabad. We used it to eat lunch at a branch of Swati Snacks, which was surprisingly awesome, drive around the city on tuk-tuks, visit the Gandhi Ashram, where we met lots of green parrots, and ended the day with a great Gujarati thali in a rather fancy setting. The next day we flew to Kochi and I got food poisoning.

On we travelled to our next two Rajasthan destinations: Jodhpur and Udaipur. Palaces and forts everywhere in both cities, this being the land of kings and all. Jodhpur, the «blue city», wasn’t as blue as expected, yet very nice. Except for a trip to Mehrangarh Fort and a visit to a market, we mostly moved about in a rather small radius around our accommodation, which was situated close to the Toorji’s Step Well in a really nice area with many shops, cafés and restaurants nearby.

After Delhi and the Taj Mahal, we hopped on a train and enjoyed a comfortable train ride, followed by a rather uncomfortable and very scary nighttime taxi ride, to Rishikesh, a place that became very popular around the world when the Beatles joined an ashram here in the late sixties. Today, it’s known for its countless ashrams/yoga academies as well as a very spiritual place in general, lying next to the «World’s most sacred river», the Ganges.

We’d had the intention to travel to India for a few years and last December we did so. We stayed for a month and started our trip in Delhi, which, looking back on it, was probably the most chaotic and intense place we visited. Yet, we didn’t experience a huge culture shock. Many things like traffic, piles of garbage/plastic next to train tracks, bad air quality were a little more intense than in pretty much any place we’d been to before, but I guess we came prepared.