Day 5: Bharatpur

I went to sleep at 9 PM hoping for a better sleep, but woke up at 12:30 AM and unable to fall back to sleep. It's going to be a long day for me.

The palace hotel is not a 5 star hotel, but it's very charming. The decorations in the hotel restaurant is astounding!

The main attraction today is the bird sanctuary, and according to everyone, now is the best time to visit since many kinds of migratory birds come to this park around this time.

We hired two rickshaws and a naturist guide, so we can cover more grounds in this huge park with an expert. The wonderful thing about this naturist is that even though he has been doing this job for more than 20 years, he was still super excited to spot the birds and show us the best parts of the park.

The most amazing thing we saw was that in one area, there were 3 or 4 trees that covered with almost 100 beautiful birds. Not sure what they are called, but they are big and colorful, with black, white and pink feathers. There were many baby birds on the trees, and they were being fed by their mothers, which got our guide extremely excited.

We can easily spend many hours here, but guess what, we only had cash for 3 hours, in order to pay for the drivers of the rickshaws and the guide. After paying them, I only have about 400 rupees (about $8) left in my wallet, and we still have 4 more days here. I hope we can use credit cards from now on since we will be in a more developed area for the Olympic competition, otherwise, we are in deep trouble!

On the way to our final hotel, we met one of the worst traffic jams I had ever seen! We spent about 30 minutes to drive 100 meters! By the way, I saw a bike carry 5 people today! A boy about 3 years old, his father the driver, his grandmother, his mother and his baby sister who was in his mother's arms.

Tomorrow Evan and Kyran will spend all day practice.Read more