Happy Holi!

The day we arrived in Hyderabad was Holi Festival (Festival of Colour). Since planning our trip, the festival is one we were particularly looking forward to. Holi is one of the biggest Hindu festivals and the locals love it. As a celebration of colour, people take to the streets and mercilessly splast each other with paint. As we headed out, we saw much remnance of this, the streets splashed with pink and orange where colour wars had broken out. We saw lots of Men, Women, Children and Dogs covered head to toe in paint! This made us a little sad as we became worried that we had missed the mayhem.

Then Emma's face suddenly lit up, a grin a mile long beaming accross her face. She had spotted some guys covered in colour and it seemed they hadn't quite finished. Surely if she stood smiling at them long enough they might, just might, attack us with their colours. When one of them asked, 'Do you want colour?', the beam on her face only got bigger. The lads were pretty excited about this and before we knew it, we had floerescent faces. 'Happy Holi!', they shouted. Now we had some colour on us, we seemed to attract alot more attention. We were attacked with colour twice more. We were well and truly Holli'd! This went down fantastically with the locals who loved that tourists were getting involved. 'Happy Holi' was hollered at us all the way home.

The powder used during Holi stains skin quite badly and it was a nightmare to wash off. Luckily we did this straight away (and would advise other Holi hopefuls to do the same) but, even so, it took a few days of serious scrubbing to remove it fully. Many of the locals were left bright faced for days. This was most amusing as the majority of people were back at work. It's difficult to take a pink-faced security guard seriously.