It’s been a leisurely few days here in Mahabaleshwar spending Christmas with Craig’s family. His aunt and uncle own 2 hotels here in Mahabaleshwar — Shreyas Hotel and the Shreyas resort. His family (and us) are occupying all of the rooms in the resort and most of the rooms in the Hotel. It’s made this portion insanely cheap since all of our lodging and food has been free courtesy of his family since they own the restaurants that are on the hotel premises. Booze has been pretty cheap as well with King Fisher’s running us about 800 rupees for 24 cans/bottles.

During the day, we all went to Elephant’s Head Point and Kates Point which are 2 of the lookout viewpoints here. They both gets you a good view of the horizon and the unbelievable polution. Thank god I had my polarizer since it cut down a lot of the glare from the sun against the smog. We took a bunch of photos, including some panoramas which Fil has already uploaded to Flickr.

Walk-way to Elephant’s Head Point:

All of us at Elephant’s head (self-timers and camera balancing are my friends):

Jumping shot at Kates Point (I’m always behind the camera for the cool ones!):

For Christmas, Craig’s family had a DJ come and we partied most of the night to songs like Eminem’s “Smack That”. Yes, “Smack That”. The most hilarious portion may be when the DJ did the “slow dance” portion and ordered everyone on the dance floor. Nothing like family members slow dancing to tunes from the 80’s

Time here has been very, very leisurely with plans ebbing and flowing since this is a really small hill town. We leave for Goa tomorrow night (the 27th) on an “ultra-luxury” bus called a “Volvo” which may or may not be affiliated in to the automobile brand.

It feels like our trip is winding down, but it’s funny to think our crazy days and nights are still ahead of us in Goa. I’m looking forward to meeting up with Suraj who will be joining us on the 30th in Goa for new year’s then continue with us to Kerala. A lowlight of the trip moving forward will be that it will just get hotter and hotter since we’re progressively moving south. Eep.

To end this entry, it’s fitting to show you our trip’s new mascot. It’s my pleasure to present you Dirty Craig:

I arrived safe and sound in Mumbai the other day and have been desperately trying to acclimate myself to the sudden weather change from 20 degrees Fahrenheit in Beijing to the 90 degrees in Mumbai. Having grown up in Vancouver, my comfort zone seems to be 40 to 80 degrees. Anything outside that range, I’m pretty uncomfortable. In a conversation this morning, however, I decided I would prefer to freeze to death than overheat that’s for sure

My time in Mumbai has been largely unremarkable as I didn’t have too much of an affinity for this city. We went to the famous Elephanta Island for an afternoon where I found out that (a) the elephant that was on this island was relocated to a zoo a long time ago and (b) it’s hilarious to see Chaitanya get attacked by a wild monkey for his bottle of drinking water

Fil joined up with us today and we’ll continue the rest of travels together. We’re leaving tommorow morning for Mahabaleshwar to meet up with Craig, which will be great since I haven’t seen him since before Thanksgiving. Suraj will be joining us closer to New Year’s in Goa and is the first time any of us have seen him since his departure from Seattle in August.

Here are 2 photos we took one from my tiny point-and-shoot and one from Fil’s Fuji F31d.

This one was taken inside the cab from Shaheen’s aunt’s place to the restaurant of the night. The cab had this crazy blue colored light inside that we asked the driver to turn on:

Fil is a genius when it comes to panaromas! This one was taken in the famous Trishna restaurant:

Goodbye Mumbai, hello Mahabaleshwar!