Class Five’s Letters – Part One

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We take a break from our travelling and return to Newport Primary School, more specifically Class 5 who we visited last week. We showed video clips of our time in the Himalayas and we talked about life on the sea. We were there to start a cultural exchange programme between the students of Newport and the students at Magno Vale Academy, a school set up by the MondoChallenge Foundation. The project is being coordinated by Class 5’s teacher Jude Savill, MondoChallenge representative Amy Pettipher, and ourselves. More on MondoChallenge later, in the meantime we just had to print and reply to these wonderful letters. Here are the first three:

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Agra’s Not Just The Taj Mahal, You Know

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The Taj Mahal is the main reason for visiting Agra, but it’s not the only one. Indeed anyone in the area who doesn’t take in the ‘Baby Taj’ (Itimad-ud-Daulah) is missing a treat as its beauty is almost on a par with her big sister. Sadly this is in stark contrast to the acid-burned arm of the beggar boy we saw at the trainstation. That’s India for you. This week’s post is packed full of photographs, for those who just want to skim through the last of our Agra blog entries.

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Fatehpur Sikri: City of Victory

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Cliché or no cliché, Akbar’s ‘City of Victory’ really does “rise majestically” from a barren rocky plateau. Referring back to my note book, before writing up this visit, I found a string of exclamations: “The scale! Location and position! Extraordinary! Fabulously well-maintained! Power! More palace than fort!” An extraordinary place…

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Telegraph Publishes Liz’s Winning Piece Tomorrow

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I’m really pleased to announce that Liz has won a travel writing piece, which will feature in tomorrow’s Daily Telegraph in the UK. If you happen to be near a news agent then please do buy a copy. If you can’t get to one, don’t worry, we’ll be publishing it on followtheboat in due course, but not before her well-deserved moment of glory. Well done, Liz. Here’s an excerpt…

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Final Sailing Today Six-Parter Published

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The last instalment of our six-part story of our trip from Turkey to India has been published in Sailing Today. Over the last year our story of the Vasco Da Gama rally, including our passage through Pirate Alley and across the Arabian Sea to India, has been serialised in British sailing magazine, Sailing Today. In this story we make our way down from Goa to Kochi with friends Emma and Katie straight through some nasty storms, signalling the beginning of monsoon. Sailing Today Issue 171 is out now and is also available online.

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Dusty Backstreets of Jaipur

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We begin our Golden Triangle trip of Rajasthan in Jaipur, a city rich with energy, commerce and culture. It quickly goes down as one of our favourite places visited to date. Known as the Pink City, it is a place where monkeys thrive on the props of the human dwellers in the back streets. In this post we invite you for an early morning walk through the back streets, ending with a little photo slide show of this rather interesting place.

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Morning Wash

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As a precursor to our Jaipur blog posts I thought I’d post this portrait up of a young man washing outside his home, illustrating the lack of running water in the backstreets of Jaipur. This sight is not uncommon in India, despite its fast-growing economy.

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A Rajput Gentleman – Introduction To The Golden Triangle

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With Liz being short-listed for another writing competition this week we thought we’d start off our Rajasthan series with one of her latest entries, which we’ve also made available for the iPad and Kindle. Beautifully written, this pulls together a number of themes set in Jaipur, Jodpur and Agra (Taj Mahal), the classic traveller trail called The Golden Triangle. The central story, however, concentrates on a remarkable man we met whilst in Jaipur whose quest to empower women from the lowest castes affected us deeply. Setting the scene for the next few blog posts this is moving, brutal yet ultimately uplifting. It is, in my opinion, Liz’s best non-fiction writing to date.

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The Cute Kid From Class 6

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Liz and I have just spent a truly inspiring day darting between three schools in the Himalayan mountains. We met some wonderful children from very poor backgrounds who are all learning English (we’re trying to ‘twin’ one class with a school in Newport via our friend, Jude, but more on that in another blog post). Just take a look at this cheeky little chappie from Class Six at Magna Vale School, Sukhia Pokri, Darjeeling. Just adorable!

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