Day 30-33: Lucknow
"Lady Lucknow had other things in mind"
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The hotel car... A Morris!
Kipling (he got round India a bit didn’t he) said ‘no city – except Bombay – is more beautiful in her garish style than Lucknow’.
Sprawled along the river Gomti Lucknow has cultivated somewhat of a reputation for its food which is why we’re here – much to the cheerful surprise of most people who we’ve told we were coming. Lucknow? How wonderful, tourists never bother to go to Lucknow.
And one could say, although not me obviously, that we had lucked out in Lucknow… arriving as we did during their annual festival of culture. As well as a carnival the festival or Mahotsav also includes things like competitive kite flying – something we’ve noticed already is a very popular pastime here - hundreds of food stalls celebrating Nawabi cuisine and traditional ghazal dancing (Youtube tells me it’s a bit like belly-dancing).
As it turned out though Lady Luck(now) had other things in mind for us – namely a blood test for me (Malaria – negative) and two days ‘relaxing’ / hibernating whilst I convalesced from a 39.8 temperature…
So there’s very little I can tell you about Lucknow save it has some very lovely hotel rooms – turns out we needed two hotels in the end as our train to Varanasi was also cancelled resulting in a 8 hour taxi ride to our next home. Not to worry, unlike Varanasi it thankfully wasn’t a matter of life and death…
