The Shifting Sands

Where the taxi dropped us for the boat ride to the Havelli It is probably very pretentious to even consider sharing my trip to Varanasi given we were in Varanasi for barely 24 hours but opportunity presented and one cannot ignore a chance to visit one of the worlds greatest ancient cities and the holiest of holy places for  Hindus.  The Mosque in tha background and the Ghats in the foreground Varanasi, known for a period of as Benares, is, along with Aleppo in Syria, consider the oldest continually occupied cities in the world. The Mosque caps the skyline despite the status of Varanasi as Hinduism's holiest city It is the most sacred of the seven Hindu holy cities and is also an important site for Buddhists being the site of Buddha's first public sermon The narrow road lined with a shrine for almost every house As a yoga teacher and teache

I have said before that it is hard to take a bad photograph in India and In Mumbai there is a real concentration of things to photograph. Kate and I had been to Dadar on a number of occasion but had never set some time aside to visit the flower markets.  This weekend we were Christmas shopping at J.J. Mheta, our camera shop at Dadar and we committed to walk through the flower market. Squeezed in between a road flyover and the Dadar train station is stall after stall of flowers ranging from Roses to Lotus flowers and everything in between.  It was colourful but, best of all, fragrant in a good way!

One of the amazing aspects of life in Mumbai is the accessibility of many things that in Australia would be not available or prohibitively expensive. I recently discover a number of altitude training facilities which you can use for around $15 per hour session. In the training room the oxygen levels is lowered to around 13% which equates to around 4,000 metres altitude when compared to 20% at sea level. The room is equipped with a spin bike, treadmill, elliptical trainer, power plate and some weight and weight machines. The lower oxygen levels give you the benefit of training at altitude which in some people stimulates your kidneys to produce EPO which increases red blood cells.  This is the normal acclimatization response to altitude. I am planning to go to Kashmir for a few days skiing at the end of the year but one of the challenges of skiing at 4,000 metres is that, for me, more time is spent panting for breath in the first day and a half than is spent skiing.  I plan on usi