Queue Jump

I decided to extend my stay in Jaipur by one night, and use it as a jumping off point for my trip to Agra, the home of the Taj Mahal. Best decision, yet. 

Things Fall Apart

For the most part I'm pretty good at packing for the unexpected. I've picked up most of these tricks from other travelers like Hanna who showed me how vitally important a head lamp can be when you decide to take a sunrise hike or just need to find the bathroom while in a darkened hostel. From Mom I learned that you can never have too many band aids, and Dad that you should always have a backup form of payment. On my most recent trip with Mom, I even had what we jokingly referred to as "the pharmacy," a bag filled with every type of medication you could think of from DayQuil to Ciprofloxacin (for extreme food poisoning), and even medication for a yeast infection or UTI. Did we use any of it? No. But that's the point. We hoped we'd never have to, but just in case we had it packed away in the pharmacy next to our rolls of toilet paper. Which, in case you were wondering were very useful in Egypt. But with this, I seem to always have at least one major failure in packing. On the last trip it was my shoes. I went for cute over comfort (I know, rookie move) and had blisters that covered the backs of my feet. So for this trip I packed comfy socks and my old pair of Pumas. Remember when Pumas were popular? Yeah, that's when these are from. I even sprayed them with permethrin to keep the mosquitoes off of them. 

Farm to Table

Before leaving, I made my mom proud by calling Kaiser for a travel appointment to make sure that I was well medicated and vaccinated for this trip. Over the phone the nurse listed everything from typhoid to malaria, Japanese encephalitis, and dengue fever. Pretty much every way you can die on the game Oregon Trail, and then some. "Japanese encephalitis?" I asked, "I've never heard of that but it sounds terrible."

Smoke gets in your eyes

When packing for India, Mom told me that Delhi was forecasted for "smoke." How could smoke be a type of weather? Does it mean that it's "fire season?" Is there ash in the air? In Israel I once saw a weather forecast for "sand," which essentially translated to sandy air -- not quite a sand storm, but enough particulate in the air that when you blew your nose at the end of the day, it looked as though you spent a significant amount of time at the beach. So what causes the smoke? Boarding the plane to India, I decided it was time to find out for my self.