Today marks exactly one month since we arrived in India. This post will shortly describe my experience so far.

Today we visited tea factory. This was quite small factory, but it was unforgettable experience nevertheless. They produced CTC tea, which means Crush, Tear, Curl and consists of very small tea particles as opposed to full leaves. Basically it's black tea you can buy in supermarkets and is not very good.

Shop owner named Bob (he shortens his indian name so the foreigners can pronounce it) suggested we visit 3 temple towns, one of them - Sravanabelagola, which has supposedly world's tallest monolithic statue. Statue is of the Jain deity Gomateshvara and measures at 17.5m. Just the day before we read about some celebration regarding this statue in newspaper (yes, we read newspapers here), so we packed and went.

We chose Dharmasthala as our next stopping point mainly because of Lonely Planet's description:

Some 10,000 pilgrims pass through this town every day; during major holidays and major festivals, the footfall can go up tenfold.

LP was right - there are a lot of people, but mostly on main street where most of the temples are located. Step outside a few hundred meters and you will find yourself surrounded by nice jungle like forest with monkeys dangling from trees and birds singing with occasional riksha sound somewhere farther away. We found really quiet temple area just outside of town and stayed mostly there.

One more todo item completed - watch bollywood movie here in India. And while it would be more "proper" to see it in bollywood's homecity Mumbai, opportunity struck and we took it while we where in Hassan.