Hi to Ella and the other children of Mrs Brunger class at East Marden Public School, we hear that you are studying India now. We hope you like our blog and can learn a little about the parts of India we are exploring. If you have any questions for us, please get Mrs Brunger to ask us using the comments field below.
Our tent accomodation is very comfortable and we both had a great nights sleep.
This morning we went to a local farm and village. The farm was in a neighbouring property to Chhatra Sagar. They were growing Aniseed, chilli, cotton and millet, with a small amount of lentils, eggplant and okra for themselves. It is sort of the end of one cropping season and the start of another, so some fields are freshly ploughed, others have just had their crops harvested and others still have crops growing in them. We were amazed at the variety of crops they had and I was really impressed with the amount of chilli they were growing. 🙂 They had one paddock growing Henna, the plant they use for temporary tattoos. We had never seen this grown before and the plants last for years. The Henna is in the leaves of the plant and it is ground together with a local gooseberry to form a paste and the paste is what they use to apply the “tattoos”.
We then drove to a local village, on the way we passed by, or had to wait for a few local shepherds with their flocks of sheep and goats walking down the roads. There was also an open paddock in which a group of young boys were playing cricket. It was a very serious match, with great celebrations whenever anyone got out!! 🙂
At the village we more or less saw people just going about their daily lives. There were many women and young girls collecting water from the local well/community tap, they would fill their steel or ceramic bowls full of water then put them on their heads to carry home, some women had 2 bowls balanced on their heads. We were given a pottery demonstration, with a heavy stone potters wheel like the one we saw in Jodhpur, we saw the pots being decorated and a local woman doing some sewing on a pedal powered sewing machine. We called into a house where 3 men had just met up and were relaxing together(that is until we got there! 🙂 ), they all had different turbins, our host explained that the full colour turbins are for those who are working (the colour tells you what sort of work they do, orange for farmers, red for shephards, turbins that are white with block printing on them are the semi-retired and white turbins are for the retired men. The community here also use opium as a gesture of welcoming. As we walked back to our jeeps, we came across a small group of young children who were still very much in Diwali mode. They had a small bag of leftover fireworks that they were having lots of fun letting off. I am sure that if this was back home none of them would have been allowed to have matches, let alone crackers and other fireworks. But they were having lots of fun and laughing and jumping. It was so good to see them all having such a great time.
Then it was back to Chhatra Sagar and a relaxing afternoon.
At 5pm I went for a guided walk up one of the hills at the end of the dam. It rose about 70m above the valley floor below, giving us views over all the surrounding area as far as the eye could see, which isn’t too far due to the smoke haze. We could see the farm and village we visited earlier today, and a great view down over the dam and the lake it formed. When we got to the top one of the waiters greeted us with some nice cool drinks, G & T or a Kingfisher beer, and some nibbles. We watched the sun go down and then headed back down before it got too dark to see the rocky path.
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I got a henna tattoo by an Indian man when we were in Queensland – it was beautiful. That is really interesting about the turbans. I never realised the different colours had significance.