The overnight train from Agra to Varanasi has never arrived on time. Arrival time continues to be printed on the tickets for 8am, when it usually arrives around twelve. No miracle occurred and we arrived around lunchtime. After checking in we had lunch at a nearby restaurant called ‘Haifa’. Under the ‘snakes’ section of the menu one could order ‘staffed mushrooms’ or ‘sassikee’.
After lunch we took a long orientation walk into the main commercial streets of Varanasi. We were led into a ‘handveavers cotton emporium’ (mum, you would have gone gaga in here). The owner was saying something about the ‘veaving and the veft and the vaft’ but the floor was padded and we were all very tired. Our leader fell asleep and it was only out of courtesy that Kate and I also did not.
Varanasi is the ‘oldest living city’, although others contest the title. Either way it is very old, at least since 2000 BC. We walked through the old city. The streets are so narrow and the terraces so high that little sun gets in and the smells from street-side samosa vendors are undiluted by clean air. The terraces are lined with colourful silk shops.
Our next stop was a German bakery with a 20 page menu. It was impressive until we discovered they actually only sold a weird peanut brittle, chocolate and apple pie. It is like this with most menus in India.
We walked back through the market, towards the hotel. There were many, open-front clothes markets along the way. As we moved down the street, more and more police appeared. Then the street lined with blue-camouflage paramilitary men with submachine guns. Vinit looked stressed. He put some people on a rickshaw out. We walked. He didn’t speak and we walked quickly.
Guns are everywhere. In the Delhi metro station there were head high sandbags with three men holding Ak-47s behind them, as if the metro was to soon receive a frontal assault. On overnight trains, men with black submachine guns tucked under their shoulders stalk up and down the aisles. Most police, however, if they have a gun at all, carry these antiquated world war 2 rifles. I’d be surprised if they even manufacture them anymore. I have seen one security guard with a musket. One police man wasn’t even issued with a stick (the police use these liberally, especially on out-of-line rickshaw drivers) so he just picked up a branch lying on the road and proceeded accordingly.
The kufuffle was about a rally of the Moselm Union. There is a history of intercommunal tension in Varanasi, and Vinit conceded that he was stressed, and that it was ‘very bad’.
We arrived at the hotel just in time for our evening boat ride along the Ganges. The name Varanasi is a combination of the names of the two ghats bookending the town. We were staying at Assi Ghat at the northern end of the city, presumably the Ghat at the other end has a name with ‘Varan’ in it. The sun had set and its was night by the time our boat took us down the Ganges with the current, past a number of dilapidated and abandoned mini-palaces along the banks for the Maharajas. We stopped and drifted at one point to observe a pooja (I think) ceremony. People lit dozens of small, banana-leaf cups with rose petals and candles in them and cast them off the boat. The lit candles drifted away from the boat in a stream with the current.
We then stopped at the main Ghat, where the daily rituals are performed. I am sure there are a number of reasons why the Ganges is a holy place for Hindus. The version we have though, goes something like as follows. In the ancient times a king in India had 80,000 sons. These sons were very naughty, however, and when they were old enough, they roamed India causing havoc. One day they came upon a powerful sadu (shaman-type figure) whom they teased and abused. The Sadu turned them all to ash and cast a curse upon them, decreeing that they (and the rest of humanity) would never reach heaven until their ashes touched the Ganges river. The complication was that the Ganges was in heaven (the milky way in the night sky was understood to be the Ganges). So this went on until another king decided that the curse should be lifted. He performed a perfect ritual for the god hindu’s consider to be the creator (Brahama) to release the Ganges on earth. However, the Ganges was very powerful and its flow needed to be controlled. So the king consulted Shiva (the destroyer) who fought a battle with the Ganges and brought it under his control. He thereupon released it on earth in its present form. Thus, to be released from the cycle of reincarnation and move to heaven the ashes of a hindu person must touch the water of the Ganges, or one of its tributaries. As such, a number of the Ghats are dedicated to cremation ceremonies, whereupon the ashes of deceased family members are scattered here.
There are caveats to this. Babies, pregnant women and people with smallpox who die (and some other specified diseases) are deemed to have died an unnatural death due to indiscretions in a previous life. These people are placed in the Ganges uncremated, and the material decomposition of their body is considered penance for their wrongdoings in a previous life. Of course this causes serious problems for the river system (alongside the tonnes and tonnes of raw sewerage pumped into the river every day) so, some time back the government introduced flesh-eating turtles to solve the problem. No-one knows what happened to the turtles, but the problem still remains, bodies continue to bob slowly down the Ganges.
The main Ghat has morning and evening rituals that have been reportedly going on for thousands of years. We parked the boat alongside many other boats so that it formed a kind of pontoon. Naturally, people climb out onto the temporary, shifting pontoon to sell you things. The ritual was a 45 minute show of fire waving and chanting. What was most interesting was the absurd number of massive lenses around. It was like a sports match. People come to Varanasi I think to get that quintessentially ‘Indian’ photograph. As we returned back to Assi ghat on the boat, we saw the burning pyres of people being cremated, and one that was yet to be burnt, with the body wrapped in white cloth and sitting between the logs.
We were exhausted and had a quick dinner before getting to bed.
We rose again at 5:30 for a morning boat ride. It was much different in the morning. We watched the sun rise over the brown water. People were bathing, washing their clothes and saris, and collecting the remains of the previous evening’s cremations.
We were both exhausted beyond reckoning and following a quick breakfast after the boat rise we went back to bed, not to rise again until 1pm. We took it very easy that afternoon. We mailed some stuff home that we don’t need anymore, along with some presents (for Christmas!). It was great to get everything organised, have some space, and reset a little. A festival was underway that afternoon and the steps to the river were packed. People were crammed in on the banks, playing in the mud, standing on their tippietoes and sitting on roofs to watch the ceremony. We could not see more than a guy with some fire standing out on a decorated tree, but everyone seemed excited about something. The goats were all painted pink.
Day 3 in Varanasi was a leisurely start before Kate and I took a walk along the front of the Ghats. All along people wash and clean their teeth, slap wet clothes against laundry boards and leave them to dry on the concrete. Water Buffalo loiter around the steps, waiting permission to go for a cooling swim. There are a number of colourful river-side temples that incessantly clag their bells. Naturally there are people approaching you selling post-cards and boat trips. It was quite relaxed as we walked past. There were not too many people.
At the main Ghat we took a left and wandered into the market area. It was very crowded and people aggressively tried to get us into their rickshaws and shops. We just tried to walk through as quickly as possible and take in all the stalls and wandering cows and interesting people walking around. When we moved out of the sweaty press of bodies and stalls, into a calmer place near to our hotel, Kate bought some very very nice linen pants and two Indian-style tops. They look fantastic and were very cheap. We spent the afternoon in a cafe with wireless internet. I had two coffees and gave myself the jitters. We posted the last blog post then.
That evening we took an overnight train to Kolkata. The train was late and we had to wait at the station, all in a circle around the bags like cows protecting their calves. There were a lot of beggars, many with appalling and disturbing injuries or disfigurements. I won’t go into detail, but it is very sad, and very confronting.
The train ride itself was fairly uneventful. We learnt a Vietnamese card game a bit like 500. Mostly we pass the time by describing waht we would be eating were we not in India. Its a simple game for me: lamb roast.
On the overnight trains everyone is woken at around 6am by this droning ‘chai.....chai....masala chai.... tea.... coffee.... chai.... chai’ or ‘chips-biscuits..... chips-biscuits.... chips ahoy’. Its just a question of whether you can get back to sleep.
We arrived in Kolkata at around lunchtime.
At the train station, which was modern and clean, was a notice board informing the public in red that the 3016 had ‘carshed’. Either interpretation is possible.
Kolkata is a remarkable place and it was a terrible shame that we had only one afternoon there. There are no tuk-tuks on the roads, just hordes of yellow, new-york style taxis. The roads are wide and the traffic is comparatively light (the spit bridge is still a highway in comparison). There are parks and open spaces with well-kept flower gardens and horses trotting along. People pay attention to road rules. The streets are lined with luscious trees and the vibe is calm and laid back (mind you, we did not go to the slum area, which would be very different).
Lunch was at a weird little restaurant and then walked to the Victoria Memorial – a dominating white marble building dedicated to Queen Victoria and surrounded by gardens. Inside there was a great museum detailing the history of Kolkata with an emphasis on the European periods of occupation. By the time we finished wandering around the museum, reading the plaques and checking out the old European paintings of India’s sights and cities (which were fascinating, what would the first European who stumbled upon the Taj Mahal have thought?) it was late afternoon and museum Kate and I wanted to visit afterwards (the largest museum in Asia) was closed. So we strolled past a auspicious Catholic Church and went for coffee at ‘flurrys’. Flurry’s served semi- real croissants (that the waiter was convinced were ‘muffins’) and warm, fudge-covered brownies, so we ate those.
That evening we went out to a rooftop restaurant for our last meal as a group. Kate and I pulled the pin fairly early, as we had to be up at 3:30am for our transfer to the airport, but a couple of Australian guys (Tim and Angus) and two British girls (Pheobe and Tash) stayed out. We ran into them at 4am on our way our the door to the airport. Everyone said their goodbyes (8 of the 12 continued on for the south India part of the trip though) and there was a fairly sombre mood as our group leader, who again we had become good friends with, had found out his uncle was going to pass away.
In theory, Kate and I were to arrive at the airport in Kolkata for a 6:50 flight to Hyderabad and a 9:50 flight to Chennai. When we arrived, however, our Hyderabad to Chennai flight had been cancelled and the next connecting flight was not until 8pm, meaning we would have to wait 12 hours at the airport (and miss all of Chennai). This was not on and I made it known to the service desk. They were very helpful. After some waiting they organised a flight for us to Bangalore and a connecting flight to Chennai with a different airway (with no extra cost, of course). We arrived safely in Chennai about 30mins later than we originally would have.
My first impressions of Chennai were a lot like Kolkata. Wide streets, a reasonable level of urban planning, palm trees and vines crawling through the narrow spaces between buildings, people obeying the road rules. Huge yellow bananas and chilled guavas hang from the streetside. Our driver for the airport transfer pointed out that people here have much darker skin and are culturally, linguistically, and ethnically very different from north Indians. He said that north Indians are predominately Aryans from Central Asia while south Indians are Dravidian and the two cultures were separated for a long time. Few people in the south speak hindi, most speak English and their local language (Tamil, in Chennai).
Upon arriving at the hotel, again we had a daytime sleep before some lunch. I went out to collect a great wad of cash for our new tour leader (whose name is Charles) and we all met at 4pm.
Just around the corner from our hotel was a south Indian temple. In place of the dark stone, engraved obselisks of north India are temples that rise to 30 or 40 feet narrowing softly as they get higher. The facades are covered in sculptures of their gods all painted in bright colours. At the top there are big, green dragon faces and hooks like teeth capping the structure. They are vibrant temples, full of life.
Further down the road, towards the beach, was a catholic church. It was white with one large, clocktower spire encased by much smaller, sharp arches on the facade. Just to the left of the entrance gates is a garden with an idol of Mary at the centre, lit by fluro-green lights. You can’t take the kitsch and the colour out of Indian religiosity. We only glimpsed inside but saw murals painted in that Italian, Sistine chapel style and some posters of Jesus looking like a supermodel. There was mass and the singing was pleasant (although incomprehensible because it was in latin).
St Thomas’s church is famous because it is reputed to be one of only three churches in the world built upon the remains of one of the twelve disciples. It is said that after Jesus’s death, Thomas (the ‘doubting Thomas from the new testament story) came to India and founded the church. He was killed in 52 A.D. There was a museum and tomb which we briefly visited. The tomb was a papier-mâché manikin of Thomas laying down with a sword. He was surrounded by lights and bright flowers and there was a small chapel inside.
The museum had relics extracted from the area of Chennai over the years. We are not sure of the historian’s abilities, however, as one exhibit shows some clay relics dated from circa ‘the olden days’.
The church was very close to Channai’s main, 12km beach. We visited at night, so could not see the colour of the water, although it is apparently quite polluted. There looked to be little waves and the sea breeze tasted like home and filled me with calm. It was not a beach like home, however, as there were hundreds of straw and rag shacks set along the sand. It was a beach-slum. Fishermen were out on the roadside, selling their daily catch – snapper, prawns, small crabs, mackerel and other fish I did not recognise. The air was heavy with salt and fish decomposing in the warm air.
One of the English girls was not impressed, I quote –
‘Only in India could they f*&% up a beach. Its oceans, its sand its beautiful’.
She also commented once after having too much to drink –
‘I can’t believe i’m hungover in India. Its like staring at a bowl of sick and being asked not to be sick’.
For dinner I had Dhosas and Sambas. Dhosas are very thin, crispy, pancakes folded over with spicy vegetable mixture in the middle. Dhosas are served with three chutneys – coconut, mint and chilli tomato. Sambas are deep fried rice cakes served in a spicy, watery soup. The cakes are fine and puffy and mixed with a little coconut.
The change in food is welcome, mixed veg and three chapattis was wearing.
Our next stop was Mamallapuram, a small fishing village an hour or so south of Chennai. We took a private minibus, which was a nice surprise (we were to take another agra-type local bus) and stopped at a bakery for the first real croissants in 6 weeks (or however long we have been away, I can’t remember).
Mamallampuram is a very old port and famous for its beachside, monolithic temples. A dyantistc king built the temples in the 7th century and today you can walk around the small town and visit them all. Kate and I first visited the 5 Rathas, a collection of temples and statues of cows and elephants carved from the granite bedrock. Apart from the monuments themselves, what is amazing is that once you pay the entry fee, you can more or less do anything – walk inside the cave temples and climb over the cows. Many families were treating these 1300 year old monuments like theme-park rides. We then walked back into town via a tree-lined, world heritage walk through more temples and monuments carved into the granite rocks rising from the earth. From the top of one temple was a great view of the beach and the lake behind. At the end of the walk was a huge boulder, perched precariously on a granite slab. It is called butterball and they tried many years ago to pull it down with seven elephants, to no avail. It looks as though it will roll down the hill at any minute, but no-one can move it.
The premiere attraction is the shore temple. Built around 640 A.D, the dark stone, pyramidal engraved temples stands on the beachfront, facing east to catch the first rays of sun rising over the ocean.
That afternoon we walked down to the beach itself. Its probably a cliché, but we are a product of our environment and being at the beach was immensely relieving. There were fishing boats beached on the shore and the men were hanging around, waiting for their nets to dry. Some kids were swimming in front of what looked like a makeshift sewerage canal. We dabbled our toes in the water and it was warm. While the water looked very clean, we thought it best not to swim here.
There were a few, onshore, windswell waves on offer, and some people in our group said they saw four people surfing. As we walked back up the road, through the markets, Kate and I saw a surfboard sitting out the front of a shop. I was very tempted. Varkarla reportedly has waves. If they do, there will be no hesitation.
The 2004 Tsunami came through here and wiped out many of the seaside restaurants. You couldn’t tell though, most have been rebuilt.
Late in the afternoon the group hired bicycles and rode out of town, past the lake-side rubbish tip where the cows congregate to feed, to an orphanage intrepid supports. The kids were friendly and I chucked the frizbee around with a few of them. Kate got talking to one of the older boys who mentioned that the girls do not go to college after to school to stay back, cook and clean. The boys go on to do engineering and such trades. We don’t know why the girls don’t. In all, it was nice to witness a positive scene among the negative ones here.
We ate at the seafood restaurant run by the orphanage owner (it too was rebuilt in 2004 after the tsunami, and a number of kids at the centre were orphaned by the tsunami). After some heavy negotiating Kate bought a silver pendant on a long necklace. It looks very elegant.
I had a seafood platter – the fish had been just caught and were on display (on ice) in the restaurant. Kate had grilled fish. The fish and calamari was fresh and plainly grilled with just a few spices. It was superb and we lived to tell the tale.
The next morning we took an all day train to Madurai after some Indian breakfast. The carriages had no air conditioning and it was steamy inside. I have not mentioned how hot it is down in the south. Each day is 35 degrees but the air is heavy with moisture and rainstorms pass from time to time. I am wearing two t-shirts per day because they are disgraced by the humidity.
Eunuchs boarded the train at one point and started clapping – clearly a prelude to their song and dance harassment. People pay them to go away. We bought some fresh guavas on the train, but they were not ripe. This is how the locals eat them. And the most sour gooseberrys imaginable.
I like South India. The vibe is relaxed. There is no yes or no, only ‘possible’ and ‘not possible’.
‘Can I have four bananas please?’
‘Possible’.
‘Do you have ripe guavas?’
‘Not Possible’.
I have just looked at a surf report for the area we will roughly be in tomorrow. There is a good chance of waves and offshore winds.
I am just going to get my hopes up. Lonely planet says they rent 'boogie' boards.
We love you and miss you.
Thankyou again for all your e-mails, we hang on for them.
Love Kate and Charles.
Wednesday 28 October 2009
Friday 23 October 2009
Jaipur (Part 2), Bharatpur, Agra, Varanasi
Jaipur (Part 2), Bharatpur, Agra, Varanasi
Our day did not end with the movie. When we exited the theatre it was midnight and raining. The tuk-tuks had shut up shop for the evening, except for one lone ranger that was willing to take us. So we packed 12 people into a vehicle half the size of a Mazda 121. Vinit was hanging off the back, fully exposed to the pouring rain. I was in the cabin, but hunched over and leaning forward as if I were about to receive a medal.
It all happened very quickly. As precisely 12pm, and following a very quiet countdown, all 12 people in the tuk-tuk, including vinit in the rain, broke out into a chorus of happy birthday. They put garlands of yellow and orange flowers over my helpless and exposed neck. It was very thoughtful.
We had something of a sleep-in the next morning – 9am. We met at 10am for a walk around old Jaipur city.
Jaipur is called ’the pink city’. The existing ‘old city’ of jaipur was constructed in 1727, although the area has been settled for much longer than that. All the ‘old cities’ we have visited are narrow and cramped affairs with buildings that appear to organically grow out of one another, like an overgrown garden. Jaipur is completely planned. A square outside wall encloses nine city blocks cut by wide streets with median strips. The terraces and promenades have been converted into modern shopfronts – each with roughly equal space and a black and white sign above it – without altering any of the previous architecture. You can walk into an 18th century shop and buy a washing machine.
All the buildings were painted pink on the orders of a Maharaja because it is considered a welcoming colour. They have faded to a terracotta now, but the uniformity of planning and colour is striking in a country that, as far as we have seen, rarely exhibits the outwards trappings of what we might call ‘order’.
We strolled through these terracotta promenades, past streetside vendors selling 2m stalks of freshly cut sugar cane, red, yellow and orange flower arrangements, under gold and silver tinsel strung across the street. Horses and carts still trot down the roads and there is the occasional elephant. Hindi advertising blares over the loudspeakers on the median strip.
The usual haggle of ‘rickshaw.... rickshaw’, ‘yes, yes, okay, my shop, very nice things you buy’, was replaced with ‘Happy Diwali... Happy Diwali’. Little kids still asked you for money, but upon enquiring what for, they reply: ‘Bomb!’.
Our first stop on the walk was the palace of winds, or the Hawa Mahal – an arch-shaped facade that lifts from the surrounding terraces. Its face is pocked with hundreds of small, delicately crafted balconies. The idea was that royal women could sit in these balconies and watch day-to-day Jaipur pass by, without themselves being seen – lest the commoners get any idea. The palace of winds is the second most photographed building in India behind the Taj. I found it a little underwhelming – especially compared to the colour of the surrounding streets. It is the only monument we have yet visited that looks more impressive in photographs than in reality.
We strolled further down the street, past more streetside vendors - this time selling honeycomb complete with live bees still working –to the city palace. This yellow sandstone building is home to the maharaja of Jaipur. We took a fairly informative audio-tour of the courtyards and communal areas. The standout was the armoury, which has hundreds of preserved weapons, from gold plated muskets, to ivory hilted daggers, pronged scissor katanas and massive broadswords. The showcase even included a emerald hilted sabre that the Mughal emperor Shah Jehan (responsible for the Taj Mahal and red fort) had given to the Mahraja of Jaipur.
We ate back at the hotel because the restaurant we wanted to eat at closed. There was a massive Punjabi sweets shop downstairs with every sickly-sweet colour you could imagine, but even if I wanted to order something the system was incomprensible to me.
We returned to the old city after a shower. Lights were strung all over the shops, houses and streets. We walked down one street under fairly lights of fluorescent blue, green, red and yellow, dangling from the shops each metre or so.
I was beginning to get suspicious at this point – all the flowers, the shopping, the pretty lights the kids asking for bombs – but it was confirmed to me that all of India must have heard about my birthday as the remainder of the night unfolded.
After dark, we returned to the rooftop restaurant of our hotel. It began as just a rumbling and had been brewing all week. Every now and then you would hear a clap in the distance and see some light on the horizon. Less occasionally something would whizz and boom nearby. But the frequency built with each passing minute until the thuds and booms became a tide. It became incessant. I have never seen anything like it. Millions of people all over India had been stockpiling fireworks over the past weeks , spending their last rupee on them (and they are quite expensive) all to be let off on the night of October 17. There were big, deep ones that would thunk and whistle then spray red and green over the sky, smaller ones that spewed out streams of white hot magnesium, and reams of chat-chat-chat explosives let off on street level. For hours and hours the show did not end. It was a completely disorganised, 360 degree, 12 hour fireworks display. Everywhere you looked another firework was being let off. Every second in the distance, or right up close was the sound of something exploding. All I can think to compare it to is a battlezone.
Vinit let off some fireworks of his own from the roof. He and Kate had also organised a cake and a very thoughtful present. It was a truly unforgettable birthday.
Unfortunately it was also unforgettable for the animals of India. The festival we were witnessing, and the reason for all the excitement, lights and crowds during the day, is called Diwali, or the festival of lights. It is like Christmas for Hindus. Diwali is a celebration of the successful return home of Rama from Sri-Lanka. The story goes that his way was lit by candles, hence the lights and fireworks. Everyone buys presents for family and friends (apparently whitegoods are very popular).
One member of our group saw a dog with bad burns the next morning and we saw a child with his hands bandaged up and covered in burns cream. The paper said there were 270 call-outs for the fire department in Delhi on Diwali night, up from 260 the previous year.
We left early that morning on the bus to Bharatpur. The only attraction in Bahratpur is the Koledo Bird sanctuary, and after checking into our very roomy hotel, we headed for the park. What we really wanted were bicycles to take around the 15km or so of pathways through the sanctuary. As we arrived there were racks and racks of bicycles and two very large Americans before us seemed able to hire them, but for us, it was ‘not possible’. Even in the face of Kate offering outrageous sums for the hire (and becoming more and more enraged), the official was unmoved – the bikes were not for hire. We even offered a cycle rickshaw driver money to use his bike, but to no avail. We walked the 14km.
Walking turned out to be not a bad option. There were eagles, owls, kingfishers, turtles, peacocks and antelopes. It had not rained in Bharatpur in some time and the wetlands were dry around the edges. What water remained was matted in a thick layer of small, green lilypads.
Most impressive was the sheer concentration of wildlife. We expected to see a bird now and then, but every 10 steps or so would be another specimen poking out from a bush. We exited the park as the sun was setting.
That night, one of the women in the group, Jana, organised a game of trivia, at which Kate and I came a respectable second. The question that stumped us was – in what country were two brothers both prime minister and president (and, name the 10 incarnations of Vishnu, but that one was a write-off).
Again we left early in the morning, this time for Agra – a 2 hour bus ride away. There was another festival on this day – one where sister go to meet their brothers for a meal. So India was travelling, and by bus.
Queuing is not an institution the British left behind in India. Young, elderly, men, women, local, foreigner – all are equal in the melee to get on public transport. It is like there was a vacuum in the bus sucking all inside of it, regardless of who they were and of what number. The trick is to position yourself in the middle of the tide and ride it on. Of course, being amateurs, none of us, did this and were left on the banks trying to jump in, only to met by the scorn of an old lady or the arm of a young man. In the end it took a brilliant blocking play – a veritable dam – by Angus, a 6’4 member of our group to ensure we all got on.
Everything changes once you are on the bus. Outside, you were competitors. Individuals must work, individually, and against all other individuals to ensure the best place on bus (seat reservations are meaningless). Inside, everyone must work together to make sure that the journey is as comfortable for everyone as it can be. Inside the bus, although it is sweaty and cramped, the air assumes a calmer, more jovial vibe. Spaces for seats appear where there were none, conversations begin. When it is time to get off, women pass their children down the aisle, in and out of the hands of complete strangers.
I stood, squashed in the aisle for the 2 hour journey bus was kept entertained by the chains of babies coming down the aisle and the need to help old ladies hurdle my pack, which was sitting in the aisle too. Viniti was winding up old ladies with no teeth by telling them that he was old and they should stand for him.
Agra smells. It smells of concentrated urine and chlorine and comes in great unseen clouds. It wakes you in the night. I have never been woken by a smell.
In travelling to Agra, we also left Rajasthan and moved into Uttar Pradesh. UP and Bihar have been described by Vinit as the ‘criminal’ states of India because of the enormous power of the Mafia. Appropriately, the first person we met in Agra was a tall, Indian man who would have once been powerfully build but now sported a round belly, wearing a dark shirt and dark aviator sunglasses. He was officially the ‘intrepid local operator’. I think he was a fixer.
Our hotel was fairly basic, but clean and very close to the Taj. Unfortunately it put up little resistance to the sewerage ghosts patrolling the city.
Our first stop in Agra was the ‘Baby Taj’ –a second, much smaller Mughal tomb on the banks of the Yumna. The Yumna runs from the Himalayas through Delhi and meets with the Ganges at Illahabad. From the balcony of the baby Taj you can see that at its height, the Yumna would be a powerful river. But the lack of rain has left large patches of bare sand, around which the remnants of the river struggle in little rivulets. The baby Taj was a pleasant introduction with large, well maintained gardens and a domed, white marble tomb in the centre. Monkeys with enormous red behinds and chipmunks had taken up residence on the site.
We drove further up the bank of the Yumna to a spot where you can see the back of the Taj for sunset. The view was from behind a razor-wire fence, on the other side of which, hawks swept upon new born puppies searching for food in the dry banks.
The sunset was a fizzer. We had dinner at a nearby restaurant. Just after the drinks order a dud firework thudded into our table, spraying embers everywhere.
A few people ended up with holes burnt int their clothes, but everyone was okay.
We rose at 5:45am to see the Taj. Our hotel was 50m walk from one of the entry gates and we were first in the queue. The guard opened the gates 2 minutes early for us and we rushed in for a people-free view at sunrise.
You may already be aware, but the Taj Mahal is a tomb built by Shah Jehan for his wife when she died. His wife was pregnant 14 times, but had only 4 children, one who would eventually imprison his own father in the Agra fort, from where he could out of the memorial he had built. The Taj is every bit the emotions that gave rise to it – love, ego and absolute power.
It is magnificent. Everyone has seen a million pictures, but nothing can prepare you for the magnitude and beauty of this building. I will not try to describe it. All I will say is that its figure inspires both awe and astonishment. It is both megalomanic and gentle. It is imposing but not dominating. I have seen no building that inspires awe and emotion like this one.
We spent 2 and half hours or so wandering its gardens and being silenced, mid-conversation at the slightest glance toward the Taj.
We ate chocolate cake for breakfast at a local cafe and I had a proper coffee.
At 11 we left for the Red Fort of Agra – another landmark associated with Shah Jehan. We had previously watched a movie set in the Agra fort, so walking among the high, scarlet walls, narrow passages, and wide public gardens, it was easy to imagine it alive with activity. The red fort is everything the Taj is not – it is a dominating building, intended to communicate power and authority. Under one of the palaces was a chamber used for the private execution of any individual in the King’s 5000-strong Harem that was unfaithful.
I had more coffee that afternoon and wrote up some of this journal. Kids, adults and water buffalo passed the cafe window plastered in colour, pink, green and red, chanting and singing. Must have been another festival.
We took an overnight train to where we are now – Varanasi. Rebecca, a woman in our group picked up a stomach bug and was sick for the entire trip. Kate stepped in a blob of vomit left in one of the squat toilets as she got up early in the morning. She was very calm. Things are begging to just wash over us. I was lying in bed the other night thinking – someone threw a cane basket at me... someone threw a cane basket at me. The unusual is becoming commonplace and one expects even to step in vomit from time to time.
So we have arrived in Varanasi (and are about to leave, but I will update you later). Varanasi is on the septic (i’m not exaggerating, even Ecoli bacteria can only survive three hours in the water) Ganges river – A place where uncremated bodies float down the river, where goats are pink and stories of blind dolphins and flesh-eating turtles abound.
The most common sight in Varanasi? Ridiculously large photo lenses.
Thankyou again everyone for the birthday messages. And thankyou Kelly for sending the photos of harry – I have downloaded them all onto the computer now so we can look at him whenever we want.
Our love to you all. I will write about Varanasi on today’s overnight train, but it may not go up for quite a few days. We arrive in Kolkata tomorrow morning and have the day, then leave at 4am for our flight to Chennai and to the beaches of the south. I have checked a surf report for goa, flat, flat flat.
Love Charles and Kate.
Our day did not end with the movie. When we exited the theatre it was midnight and raining. The tuk-tuks had shut up shop for the evening, except for one lone ranger that was willing to take us. So we packed 12 people into a vehicle half the size of a Mazda 121. Vinit was hanging off the back, fully exposed to the pouring rain. I was in the cabin, but hunched over and leaning forward as if I were about to receive a medal.
It all happened very quickly. As precisely 12pm, and following a very quiet countdown, all 12 people in the tuk-tuk, including vinit in the rain, broke out into a chorus of happy birthday. They put garlands of yellow and orange flowers over my helpless and exposed neck. It was very thoughtful.
We had something of a sleep-in the next morning – 9am. We met at 10am for a walk around old Jaipur city.
Jaipur is called ’the pink city’. The existing ‘old city’ of jaipur was constructed in 1727, although the area has been settled for much longer than that. All the ‘old cities’ we have visited are narrow and cramped affairs with buildings that appear to organically grow out of one another, like an overgrown garden. Jaipur is completely planned. A square outside wall encloses nine city blocks cut by wide streets with median strips. The terraces and promenades have been converted into modern shopfronts – each with roughly equal space and a black and white sign above it – without altering any of the previous architecture. You can walk into an 18th century shop and buy a washing machine.
All the buildings were painted pink on the orders of a Maharaja because it is considered a welcoming colour. They have faded to a terracotta now, but the uniformity of planning and colour is striking in a country that, as far as we have seen, rarely exhibits the outwards trappings of what we might call ‘order’.
We strolled through these terracotta promenades, past streetside vendors selling 2m stalks of freshly cut sugar cane, red, yellow and orange flower arrangements, under gold and silver tinsel strung across the street. Horses and carts still trot down the roads and there is the occasional elephant. Hindi advertising blares over the loudspeakers on the median strip.
The usual haggle of ‘rickshaw.... rickshaw’, ‘yes, yes, okay, my shop, very nice things you buy’, was replaced with ‘Happy Diwali... Happy Diwali’. Little kids still asked you for money, but upon enquiring what for, they reply: ‘Bomb!’.
Our first stop on the walk was the palace of winds, or the Hawa Mahal – an arch-shaped facade that lifts from the surrounding terraces. Its face is pocked with hundreds of small, delicately crafted balconies. The idea was that royal women could sit in these balconies and watch day-to-day Jaipur pass by, without themselves being seen – lest the commoners get any idea. The palace of winds is the second most photographed building in India behind the Taj. I found it a little underwhelming – especially compared to the colour of the surrounding streets. It is the only monument we have yet visited that looks more impressive in photographs than in reality.
We strolled further down the street, past more streetside vendors - this time selling honeycomb complete with live bees still working –to the city palace. This yellow sandstone building is home to the maharaja of Jaipur. We took a fairly informative audio-tour of the courtyards and communal areas. The standout was the armoury, which has hundreds of preserved weapons, from gold plated muskets, to ivory hilted daggers, pronged scissor katanas and massive broadswords. The showcase even included a emerald hilted sabre that the Mughal emperor Shah Jehan (responsible for the Taj Mahal and red fort) had given to the Mahraja of Jaipur.
We ate back at the hotel because the restaurant we wanted to eat at closed. There was a massive Punjabi sweets shop downstairs with every sickly-sweet colour you could imagine, but even if I wanted to order something the system was incomprensible to me.
We returned to the old city after a shower. Lights were strung all over the shops, houses and streets. We walked down one street under fairly lights of fluorescent blue, green, red and yellow, dangling from the shops each metre or so.
I was beginning to get suspicious at this point – all the flowers, the shopping, the pretty lights the kids asking for bombs – but it was confirmed to me that all of India must have heard about my birthday as the remainder of the night unfolded.
After dark, we returned to the rooftop restaurant of our hotel. It began as just a rumbling and had been brewing all week. Every now and then you would hear a clap in the distance and see some light on the horizon. Less occasionally something would whizz and boom nearby. But the frequency built with each passing minute until the thuds and booms became a tide. It became incessant. I have never seen anything like it. Millions of people all over India had been stockpiling fireworks over the past weeks , spending their last rupee on them (and they are quite expensive) all to be let off on the night of October 17. There were big, deep ones that would thunk and whistle then spray red and green over the sky, smaller ones that spewed out streams of white hot magnesium, and reams of chat-chat-chat explosives let off on street level. For hours and hours the show did not end. It was a completely disorganised, 360 degree, 12 hour fireworks display. Everywhere you looked another firework was being let off. Every second in the distance, or right up close was the sound of something exploding. All I can think to compare it to is a battlezone.
Vinit let off some fireworks of his own from the roof. He and Kate had also organised a cake and a very thoughtful present. It was a truly unforgettable birthday.
Unfortunately it was also unforgettable for the animals of India. The festival we were witnessing, and the reason for all the excitement, lights and crowds during the day, is called Diwali, or the festival of lights. It is like Christmas for Hindus. Diwali is a celebration of the successful return home of Rama from Sri-Lanka. The story goes that his way was lit by candles, hence the lights and fireworks. Everyone buys presents for family and friends (apparently whitegoods are very popular).
One member of our group saw a dog with bad burns the next morning and we saw a child with his hands bandaged up and covered in burns cream. The paper said there were 270 call-outs for the fire department in Delhi on Diwali night, up from 260 the previous year.
We left early that morning on the bus to Bharatpur. The only attraction in Bahratpur is the Koledo Bird sanctuary, and after checking into our very roomy hotel, we headed for the park. What we really wanted were bicycles to take around the 15km or so of pathways through the sanctuary. As we arrived there were racks and racks of bicycles and two very large Americans before us seemed able to hire them, but for us, it was ‘not possible’. Even in the face of Kate offering outrageous sums for the hire (and becoming more and more enraged), the official was unmoved – the bikes were not for hire. We even offered a cycle rickshaw driver money to use his bike, but to no avail. We walked the 14km.
Walking turned out to be not a bad option. There were eagles, owls, kingfishers, turtles, peacocks and antelopes. It had not rained in Bharatpur in some time and the wetlands were dry around the edges. What water remained was matted in a thick layer of small, green lilypads.
Most impressive was the sheer concentration of wildlife. We expected to see a bird now and then, but every 10 steps or so would be another specimen poking out from a bush. We exited the park as the sun was setting.
That night, one of the women in the group, Jana, organised a game of trivia, at which Kate and I came a respectable second. The question that stumped us was – in what country were two brothers both prime minister and president (and, name the 10 incarnations of Vishnu, but that one was a write-off).
Again we left early in the morning, this time for Agra – a 2 hour bus ride away. There was another festival on this day – one where sister go to meet their brothers for a meal. So India was travelling, and by bus.
Queuing is not an institution the British left behind in India. Young, elderly, men, women, local, foreigner – all are equal in the melee to get on public transport. It is like there was a vacuum in the bus sucking all inside of it, regardless of who they were and of what number. The trick is to position yourself in the middle of the tide and ride it on. Of course, being amateurs, none of us, did this and were left on the banks trying to jump in, only to met by the scorn of an old lady or the arm of a young man. In the end it took a brilliant blocking play – a veritable dam – by Angus, a 6’4 member of our group to ensure we all got on.
Everything changes once you are on the bus. Outside, you were competitors. Individuals must work, individually, and against all other individuals to ensure the best place on bus (seat reservations are meaningless). Inside, everyone must work together to make sure that the journey is as comfortable for everyone as it can be. Inside the bus, although it is sweaty and cramped, the air assumes a calmer, more jovial vibe. Spaces for seats appear where there were none, conversations begin. When it is time to get off, women pass their children down the aisle, in and out of the hands of complete strangers.
I stood, squashed in the aisle for the 2 hour journey bus was kept entertained by the chains of babies coming down the aisle and the need to help old ladies hurdle my pack, which was sitting in the aisle too. Viniti was winding up old ladies with no teeth by telling them that he was old and they should stand for him.
Agra smells. It smells of concentrated urine and chlorine and comes in great unseen clouds. It wakes you in the night. I have never been woken by a smell.
In travelling to Agra, we also left Rajasthan and moved into Uttar Pradesh. UP and Bihar have been described by Vinit as the ‘criminal’ states of India because of the enormous power of the Mafia. Appropriately, the first person we met in Agra was a tall, Indian man who would have once been powerfully build but now sported a round belly, wearing a dark shirt and dark aviator sunglasses. He was officially the ‘intrepid local operator’. I think he was a fixer.
Our hotel was fairly basic, but clean and very close to the Taj. Unfortunately it put up little resistance to the sewerage ghosts patrolling the city.
Our first stop in Agra was the ‘Baby Taj’ –a second, much smaller Mughal tomb on the banks of the Yumna. The Yumna runs from the Himalayas through Delhi and meets with the Ganges at Illahabad. From the balcony of the baby Taj you can see that at its height, the Yumna would be a powerful river. But the lack of rain has left large patches of bare sand, around which the remnants of the river struggle in little rivulets. The baby Taj was a pleasant introduction with large, well maintained gardens and a domed, white marble tomb in the centre. Monkeys with enormous red behinds and chipmunks had taken up residence on the site.
We drove further up the bank of the Yumna to a spot where you can see the back of the Taj for sunset. The view was from behind a razor-wire fence, on the other side of which, hawks swept upon new born puppies searching for food in the dry banks.
The sunset was a fizzer. We had dinner at a nearby restaurant. Just after the drinks order a dud firework thudded into our table, spraying embers everywhere.
A few people ended up with holes burnt int their clothes, but everyone was okay.
We rose at 5:45am to see the Taj. Our hotel was 50m walk from one of the entry gates and we were first in the queue. The guard opened the gates 2 minutes early for us and we rushed in for a people-free view at sunrise.
You may already be aware, but the Taj Mahal is a tomb built by Shah Jehan for his wife when she died. His wife was pregnant 14 times, but had only 4 children, one who would eventually imprison his own father in the Agra fort, from where he could out of the memorial he had built. The Taj is every bit the emotions that gave rise to it – love, ego and absolute power.
It is magnificent. Everyone has seen a million pictures, but nothing can prepare you for the magnitude and beauty of this building. I will not try to describe it. All I will say is that its figure inspires both awe and astonishment. It is both megalomanic and gentle. It is imposing but not dominating. I have seen no building that inspires awe and emotion like this one.
We spent 2 and half hours or so wandering its gardens and being silenced, mid-conversation at the slightest glance toward the Taj.
We ate chocolate cake for breakfast at a local cafe and I had a proper coffee.
At 11 we left for the Red Fort of Agra – another landmark associated with Shah Jehan. We had previously watched a movie set in the Agra fort, so walking among the high, scarlet walls, narrow passages, and wide public gardens, it was easy to imagine it alive with activity. The red fort is everything the Taj is not – it is a dominating building, intended to communicate power and authority. Under one of the palaces was a chamber used for the private execution of any individual in the King’s 5000-strong Harem that was unfaithful.
I had more coffee that afternoon and wrote up some of this journal. Kids, adults and water buffalo passed the cafe window plastered in colour, pink, green and red, chanting and singing. Must have been another festival.
We took an overnight train to where we are now – Varanasi. Rebecca, a woman in our group picked up a stomach bug and was sick for the entire trip. Kate stepped in a blob of vomit left in one of the squat toilets as she got up early in the morning. She was very calm. Things are begging to just wash over us. I was lying in bed the other night thinking – someone threw a cane basket at me... someone threw a cane basket at me. The unusual is becoming commonplace and one expects even to step in vomit from time to time.
So we have arrived in Varanasi (and are about to leave, but I will update you later). Varanasi is on the septic (i’m not exaggerating, even Ecoli bacteria can only survive three hours in the water) Ganges river – A place where uncremated bodies float down the river, where goats are pink and stories of blind dolphins and flesh-eating turtles abound.
The most common sight in Varanasi? Ridiculously large photo lenses.
Thankyou again everyone for the birthday messages. And thankyou Kelly for sending the photos of harry – I have downloaded them all onto the computer now so we can look at him whenever we want.
Our love to you all. I will write about Varanasi on today’s overnight train, but it may not go up for quite a few days. We arrive in Kolkata tomorrow morning and have the day, then leave at 4am for our flight to Chennai and to the beaches of the south. I have checked a surf report for goa, flat, flat flat.
Love Charles and Kate.
Thursday 22 October 2009
Jaipur (Part 1)
Jaipur, part 1
We arrived in Jaipur after a fairly uneventful, 4 hour bus journey. We had seats that no-one tried to take, we were on highways and not mountain bends, there was little traffic and little noise. I slept for the first couple of hours and read half of For whom the Bell Tolls in the second couple. The only major event was that we stopped at an arrangement of roadside shacks to use the bathroom and have some tea. I had a questionable somosa (they were delicious despite the kitchen) and some hot masala chai, I held back on using the squat toilets – they were so putrid even the locals opted for the rubbish-pile over them.
Defecation in India is, by necessity, an open process. Space and time dictate the act be performed in any situation or place - on road-sides, train-lines, bus aisles and street walls and corners. Toilets are basic and immediate. Ceramic tiles face short cement walls; they do not conceal the user but offer a focus and concentration point. Unfortunately the Indian drainage is (for the most part) an open sewer system running through streets providing drinking water to the mass of wandering dogs and sacred cows. Drains are often blocked and overflowing.
Jaipur is the capital of Rajasthan with an official population half that of Sydney and an unofficial one much higher. Although it was occupied for much longer, Mahraja Man Singh founded the place in 1756 (I think...) and built his fort (Amber Fort) and city there.
After disembarking the bus we caught tuk-tuks to the hotel and were greeted on arrival with a ping pong table. I remain undefeated in international appearances (although am 0-2 in Chess). Our hotel room was quite small, but clean, and we barely spent a second in there over the next couple of days.
Our first outing was to the Amber fort – about 8km from town – and built when Japiur was founded. The Amber fort is more yellow than Amber and is built from local sandstone. The fort however, is surrounded by a complex of stone walls and turrets following the ridges of the surrounding mountains. In terms of land-area, I think this was the biggest we had visited.
After passing a small line of shacks selling various wares (including ‘cold bear’ for the adventurous tourist), entering the gate and pushing through a wave of people selling postcards, sparkly pens and gyrating puppets, we ascended an outer wall to the palace area. We have been to a lot of forts and palaces now, so it takes a fair bit to impress, but this palace was interesting because you free to explore mazes of the palace. Most forts have a path to be followed and many sealed off areas. The Amber fort was not as well maintained, but you could wander through the narrow passageways, up and down stairs, into the bathrooms and the kitchens, or look out from the balconies. It was easier to immerse yourself in another world by doing this and I was pleasantly surprised by the experience.
We packed 5 people into a tuk-tuk back into central Jaipur, where we were meeting at the movie cinema to have some dinner and see a bollywood movie. We were due to meet at around 7pm, but our leader was running a bit late, so we waited sought out a place for a drink and had a warm Kingfisher to pass the time.
If you stay in one place too long you are bound to be surrounded by people – children and women begging, people selling puppets (I really don’t get the puppets) and bangles (Kate bought a pack which has slowly been disintegrating each time she removes them from her arm). The movie entrance had a clear line of partition between the sellers and the middle-class movie goers. The line was enforced by a Ray-Ban wearing security guard who was partial to a photo with us – he would ask the guys in the group myself included to come into the light (round the corner) for a good photo. Although this is odd and felt it we had a fair bit of time and everyone was quite relaxed, so we hung around for a bit of a chat with both sides of the line. It all fairly elementary (as I speak little hindi and they speak little English) but there are plenty of smiles.
After hanging around out the front of the movie cinema, we went out for dinner at a thali place. A thali is a plate with inbuilt sections to hold very small amounts of various dishes. Upon entering the restaurant we were welcomed by 20 personal waiters who invited our 12-stong group into the kitchen to watch how things were cooked. There seemed to be about 50 cooks. One to make the dough, one to roll the dough, one to pass the dough to the cooker, one to cook the dough, one to take the chapatti off, one to put the chapatti on a plate, one to take the chapatti to the customer . The head cook was a heavily moustanched man with a belly like a sack of flour. Some people took part in the cooking.
We ate our dinner, which was delicious, and very spicy. Another thing about eating in Indian restaurants is that you are rarely alone. This was an extreme case, but as we ate, the 20 waiters just stood around our table watching us, every 30 seconds or so, one from the flock would approach and ask ‘would like some more sir’. I find it quite unnerving eating in this way.
The restaurant was just beside the bollywood cinema. The cinema itself is famous in Asia (it is called the Raj Mandi). Our movie was at 9:30 so we had to hang around for a while again. Someone we did not know vomited out the front of the cinema and then moved on. We have seen many sick locals here and Vinit said he often gets sick.
The movie was titled ‘blue’. The Raj Mandi was a huge, imperial style cinema with an expansive foyer covered in patterned blue carpet. The theatre had a proper maroon velvet curtain and an enormous, domed ceiling.
The movie made me realise that crap Hollywood movies like the fast and the furious are actually sophistacted and deeply intelligent treatises on the human condition. Blue was somewhere between a midday extreme sports program and a soft porn movie.
The plot?
A young, filthy rich go-get-em motorbike rider in a white shirt is employed by a hook-nosed, filthy rich motorbije rider in a balck shirt to transferr $50 million to the airpot. He drops it when a truck explodes near him. White shirt flees to Barbados to enlist the help of his chubby, filthy rich brother. Black shirt follows him and violently attempts to get his money back. Instead of selling his $100 million dollar boar to bail out white shirt, his brother decides that the most logical solution to the problem is to go in search of Indian treasure lost in 1947. That way they can maintain their lifestyle and have plenty of scenes of women in bikinis. In the end the treasure is found, black shirt and his goons are killed, but white shirt and his brother are betrayed at the last minute by a mutual friend.
I may be underselling the plot a little, the entire movie was in Hindi, but somehow I don’t think so. It really was just there so that the scenes of half-naked women, the exploits of the uber-rich, and judicious placements of Heineken bottles could be classified as a ‘movie’.
The moral?
Women contribute to society by flashing their bums and man contribute by relaxing beside the pool staring at womens bums when they are not out blowing up trucks and searching for treasure.
This is just one movie and I’m sure its not representative of all bollywood movies. It is interesting to see, however, how the modern india is represented through the bolloywood frame.
What is most incredible is the gap between the cinema and reality. In any country cinema is reflective of the dreams of its society. But nowhere can I imagine that the dreams are so distant and the reality so crushing. From this virtual, air-conditioned world of sex and opulence you step over the breach, smack into dusty faced, straw-haired children, confused about whether to ask you for money or ask you to play with them.
The next day was my birthday and I will do a separate post.
Thankyou for you e-mails. We love them. It makes us so happy to hear from home.
Low battery. We love you all and will post part 2 tomorrow.
Love Kate and Charles.
We arrived in Jaipur after a fairly uneventful, 4 hour bus journey. We had seats that no-one tried to take, we were on highways and not mountain bends, there was little traffic and little noise. I slept for the first couple of hours and read half of For whom the Bell Tolls in the second couple. The only major event was that we stopped at an arrangement of roadside shacks to use the bathroom and have some tea. I had a questionable somosa (they were delicious despite the kitchen) and some hot masala chai, I held back on using the squat toilets – they were so putrid even the locals opted for the rubbish-pile over them.
Defecation in India is, by necessity, an open process. Space and time dictate the act be performed in any situation or place - on road-sides, train-lines, bus aisles and street walls and corners. Toilets are basic and immediate. Ceramic tiles face short cement walls; they do not conceal the user but offer a focus and concentration point. Unfortunately the Indian drainage is (for the most part) an open sewer system running through streets providing drinking water to the mass of wandering dogs and sacred cows. Drains are often blocked and overflowing.
Jaipur is the capital of Rajasthan with an official population half that of Sydney and an unofficial one much higher. Although it was occupied for much longer, Mahraja Man Singh founded the place in 1756 (I think...) and built his fort (Amber Fort) and city there.
After disembarking the bus we caught tuk-tuks to the hotel and were greeted on arrival with a ping pong table. I remain undefeated in international appearances (although am 0-2 in Chess). Our hotel room was quite small, but clean, and we barely spent a second in there over the next couple of days.
Our first outing was to the Amber fort – about 8km from town – and built when Japiur was founded. The Amber fort is more yellow than Amber and is built from local sandstone. The fort however, is surrounded by a complex of stone walls and turrets following the ridges of the surrounding mountains. In terms of land-area, I think this was the biggest we had visited.
After passing a small line of shacks selling various wares (including ‘cold bear’ for the adventurous tourist), entering the gate and pushing through a wave of people selling postcards, sparkly pens and gyrating puppets, we ascended an outer wall to the palace area. We have been to a lot of forts and palaces now, so it takes a fair bit to impress, but this palace was interesting because you free to explore mazes of the palace. Most forts have a path to be followed and many sealed off areas. The Amber fort was not as well maintained, but you could wander through the narrow passageways, up and down stairs, into the bathrooms and the kitchens, or look out from the balconies. It was easier to immerse yourself in another world by doing this and I was pleasantly surprised by the experience.
We packed 5 people into a tuk-tuk back into central Jaipur, where we were meeting at the movie cinema to have some dinner and see a bollywood movie. We were due to meet at around 7pm, but our leader was running a bit late, so we waited sought out a place for a drink and had a warm Kingfisher to pass the time.
If you stay in one place too long you are bound to be surrounded by people – children and women begging, people selling puppets (I really don’t get the puppets) and bangles (Kate bought a pack which has slowly been disintegrating each time she removes them from her arm). The movie entrance had a clear line of partition between the sellers and the middle-class movie goers. The line was enforced by a Ray-Ban wearing security guard who was partial to a photo with us – he would ask the guys in the group myself included to come into the light (round the corner) for a good photo. Although this is odd and felt it we had a fair bit of time and everyone was quite relaxed, so we hung around for a bit of a chat with both sides of the line. It all fairly elementary (as I speak little hindi and they speak little English) but there are plenty of smiles.
After hanging around out the front of the movie cinema, we went out for dinner at a thali place. A thali is a plate with inbuilt sections to hold very small amounts of various dishes. Upon entering the restaurant we were welcomed by 20 personal waiters who invited our 12-stong group into the kitchen to watch how things were cooked. There seemed to be about 50 cooks. One to make the dough, one to roll the dough, one to pass the dough to the cooker, one to cook the dough, one to take the chapatti off, one to put the chapatti on a plate, one to take the chapatti to the customer . The head cook was a heavily moustanched man with a belly like a sack of flour. Some people took part in the cooking.
We ate our dinner, which was delicious, and very spicy. Another thing about eating in Indian restaurants is that you are rarely alone. This was an extreme case, but as we ate, the 20 waiters just stood around our table watching us, every 30 seconds or so, one from the flock would approach and ask ‘would like some more sir’. I find it quite unnerving eating in this way.
The restaurant was just beside the bollywood cinema. The cinema itself is famous in Asia (it is called the Raj Mandi). Our movie was at 9:30 so we had to hang around for a while again. Someone we did not know vomited out the front of the cinema and then moved on. We have seen many sick locals here and Vinit said he often gets sick.
The movie was titled ‘blue’. The Raj Mandi was a huge, imperial style cinema with an expansive foyer covered in patterned blue carpet. The theatre had a proper maroon velvet curtain and an enormous, domed ceiling.
The movie made me realise that crap Hollywood movies like the fast and the furious are actually sophistacted and deeply intelligent treatises on the human condition. Blue was somewhere between a midday extreme sports program and a soft porn movie.
The plot?
A young, filthy rich go-get-em motorbike rider in a white shirt is employed by a hook-nosed, filthy rich motorbije rider in a balck shirt to transferr $50 million to the airpot. He drops it when a truck explodes near him. White shirt flees to Barbados to enlist the help of his chubby, filthy rich brother. Black shirt follows him and violently attempts to get his money back. Instead of selling his $100 million dollar boar to bail out white shirt, his brother decides that the most logical solution to the problem is to go in search of Indian treasure lost in 1947. That way they can maintain their lifestyle and have plenty of scenes of women in bikinis. In the end the treasure is found, black shirt and his goons are killed, but white shirt and his brother are betrayed at the last minute by a mutual friend.
I may be underselling the plot a little, the entire movie was in Hindi, but somehow I don’t think so. It really was just there so that the scenes of half-naked women, the exploits of the uber-rich, and judicious placements of Heineken bottles could be classified as a ‘movie’.
The moral?
Women contribute to society by flashing their bums and man contribute by relaxing beside the pool staring at womens bums when they are not out blowing up trucks and searching for treasure.
This is just one movie and I’m sure its not representative of all bollywood movies. It is interesting to see, however, how the modern india is represented through the bolloywood frame.
What is most incredible is the gap between the cinema and reality. In any country cinema is reflective of the dreams of its society. But nowhere can I imagine that the dreams are so distant and the reality so crushing. From this virtual, air-conditioned world of sex and opulence you step over the breach, smack into dusty faced, straw-haired children, confused about whether to ask you for money or ask you to play with them.
The next day was my birthday and I will do a separate post.
Thankyou for you e-mails. We love them. It makes us so happy to hear from home.
Low battery. We love you all and will post part 2 tomorrow.
Love Kate and Charles.
Friday 16 October 2009
Pushkar
Pushkar
Hello all. First thing – our phone should be fixed by this afternoon, so I will try to call tomorrow.
Second – I have posted two blogs simultaneously, so don’t read this one first. Move down to the previous one and start there!
As I think we mentioned, we arrived in Pushkar around mid-afternoon and enjoyed vegetable burgers. Pushkar is considered by Hindus to be a holy city. It is the site of the only Brahman temple (apparently distinct from the caste – Brahmins) in India. The story behind this is that Brahma (who is considered to be the god of creation, as opposed to the operator (Vishnu) and the destroyer (Shiva)) wanted to perform some ritual down at the lake (which is said to have formed when Brahma threw a lotus flower on the earth and it landed in Puskar) but his wife would not come. Undeterred, Brahma performed the ritual with another woman, tantamount to marrying her. Suitably perturbed, his original wife cursed Brahma from a hill and decreed that he would be worshipped in no other town than Pushkar. Thus, Pushkar is a holy place.
Westerners seem to have difficulty interpreting ‘holy’. As with Dharamashala, we seem to think it means ‘place to get stoned’. Marajuana use here is apparently rife, as are dreadlocked and dusty hippies.
And as with the rest of India, there is always a scam lurking around the corner. A number of Hindu priests perform a ritual on the ghats for those who wish to have it done (as there are a very large number of Hindu pilgrims that come here specifically for this purpose). But for every one of these priests there are many scam priests who performed a hackneyed version for unwary toursist and charge exorbitant prices for the privilege. A couple of guys from the group almost fell prey to this one.
Additionally, Pushkar is the hang-out of ‘sadus’, naked holy men that have renounced material possessions, spend most of the year in the Himalayas living off nothing before making various pilgrimages to holy cities in India, one of them being Pushkar. Again, however, for every one of these individual there are numerous imposters who wander the streets asking tourists for money.
For reasons mentioned earlier the lake is considered by Hindu’s to be holy. They pray on its shores for health, wealth and relationships. However, at the moment, there is no water on the lake – just a dusty, dirty hole and some backhoes in the middle. The government has drained the entire body of water because of the repugnant pollution that had festered in the lake for decades. One hundred and fifty thousand fish died within some short period of time and the stench was driving people away. When the government drained the river they took another 150,000 fish with them. Unbelievably, the government then sold these fish onto anyone willing to pay for them. Who knows what was in those fish.
Pushkar is a fairly typical, and small, town in the Rajasthani desert. Its dry, hot, replete with clothes stalls, rubbish and cows eating the rubbish - but with a few quirks. Emaciated, half-naked men carrying beads and a vessel for water and food stroll the streets, around an innocuous corner a naked man squats under a holy tree, westerners ‘discovering themselves’ drive around on motorbikes with Hare Krishna Haricuts and bindis on their heads, and pilgrims from all over India frequent the various temples in the city. Alcohol, drugs, meat, eggs and leaving your shoes within 40 feet of the Ghats are all theoretically banned.
On the evening we arrived, we took an orientation walk around the city. We visited the outsides of various temples – Sikh, Hindu, Brahman, Western (there is only one ATM in town, often with no money and a long line of pilgrims). We ended up having dinner back at the hotel and watched our second bollywood movie – an epic about a marriage of alliance between a Mughal king in Agra and a Rajput princess in Amer. I actually didn’t mind it. As is par for the course, it was horrendously cheesy, but there was some bread under it. The movie is over 4 hours long, so we await the final thrilling instalment tonight.
I woke at 4:45am the next morning (Kate chose to sleep in) for a bike ride and walk to a temple on top of a small mountain just outside Pushkar for views of the sunrise. So we rode through dark, shuttered streets, past the half-naked men sleeping outside a temple to a cafe where we dropped our bikes and made the steep climb up the mountain. It was a hard walk, nearly vertical towards the top and given my waning fitness a good morning workout. The sunrise was obscured by some clouds, but the views of waking Pushkar were expansive. We were also entertained/scared by a throng of lungi monkeys intent on baring their teeth and stealing what they could. I also had the largest glass of chai thus far.
We then had breakfast at a restaurant called ‘Honey and spice’ which had nice coffee and the best muesli I have yet tasted. There was no milk, just the thin, Indian yoghurt, dried figs, bananas, papyaya, apple, cashews, almonds, pomegranate, corn flakes and various other adornments. Actually I don’t think there was any Muesli in the muesli.
Upon returning to the hotel I discovered that I had managed to lock Kate in the room (in my drowsy efforts to make sure people would not walk in while she was asleep). She was not happy, but studiously working on improving the last blog entry.
We decided to go and re-do the mornings journey. So we jumped on the bikes again, returned to the cafe for some more coffee and muesli, and ascended the hill. It was much hotter and far more difficult – even the monkeys were sleeping in the shade. A number of more elderly pilgrims seemed to be having no such difficulty. We enjoyed the views and made our way back down. On our way we got briefly taking with some people who had come all the way from Kolkata to visit the temple (the temple itself is very small, just one room really).
I had my first encounter with a scam. On our way to the hill, some guy in a handicrafts store threw a cane basket in my path, which I, of course, ran over (although only a tiny part of it). He demanded money for the basket in course. We just rode off. But I thought this was a fairly enterprising scam – it wasn’t in the guidebook anyway!
Kate did some shopping while I minded the bikes and got talking with a very young man (10) called Vijay who crawled all over the bikes (and tried to crawl all over me). Exhausted and hot, we spent the remained of the afternoon beside the pool, and I had a quick nap.
Pushkar, despite all its peculiarities and weirdness, and a dry lake, is still very beautiful. The plains and small, peaky mountains that rise around it, are a perfect frame for this quaint, light-blue painted town.
Our love to you all.
Kate and Charles.
Hello all. First thing – our phone should be fixed by this afternoon, so I will try to call tomorrow.
Second – I have posted two blogs simultaneously, so don’t read this one first. Move down to the previous one and start there!
As I think we mentioned, we arrived in Pushkar around mid-afternoon and enjoyed vegetable burgers. Pushkar is considered by Hindus to be a holy city. It is the site of the only Brahman temple (apparently distinct from the caste – Brahmins) in India. The story behind this is that Brahma (who is considered to be the god of creation, as opposed to the operator (Vishnu) and the destroyer (Shiva)) wanted to perform some ritual down at the lake (which is said to have formed when Brahma threw a lotus flower on the earth and it landed in Puskar) but his wife would not come. Undeterred, Brahma performed the ritual with another woman, tantamount to marrying her. Suitably perturbed, his original wife cursed Brahma from a hill and decreed that he would be worshipped in no other town than Pushkar. Thus, Pushkar is a holy place.
Westerners seem to have difficulty interpreting ‘holy’. As with Dharamashala, we seem to think it means ‘place to get stoned’. Marajuana use here is apparently rife, as are dreadlocked and dusty hippies.
And as with the rest of India, there is always a scam lurking around the corner. A number of Hindu priests perform a ritual on the ghats for those who wish to have it done (as there are a very large number of Hindu pilgrims that come here specifically for this purpose). But for every one of these priests there are many scam priests who performed a hackneyed version for unwary toursist and charge exorbitant prices for the privilege. A couple of guys from the group almost fell prey to this one.
Additionally, Pushkar is the hang-out of ‘sadus’, naked holy men that have renounced material possessions, spend most of the year in the Himalayas living off nothing before making various pilgrimages to holy cities in India, one of them being Pushkar. Again, however, for every one of these individual there are numerous imposters who wander the streets asking tourists for money.
For reasons mentioned earlier the lake is considered by Hindu’s to be holy. They pray on its shores for health, wealth and relationships. However, at the moment, there is no water on the lake – just a dusty, dirty hole and some backhoes in the middle. The government has drained the entire body of water because of the repugnant pollution that had festered in the lake for decades. One hundred and fifty thousand fish died within some short period of time and the stench was driving people away. When the government drained the river they took another 150,000 fish with them. Unbelievably, the government then sold these fish onto anyone willing to pay for them. Who knows what was in those fish.
Pushkar is a fairly typical, and small, town in the Rajasthani desert. Its dry, hot, replete with clothes stalls, rubbish and cows eating the rubbish - but with a few quirks. Emaciated, half-naked men carrying beads and a vessel for water and food stroll the streets, around an innocuous corner a naked man squats under a holy tree, westerners ‘discovering themselves’ drive around on motorbikes with Hare Krishna Haricuts and bindis on their heads, and pilgrims from all over India frequent the various temples in the city. Alcohol, drugs, meat, eggs and leaving your shoes within 40 feet of the Ghats are all theoretically banned.
On the evening we arrived, we took an orientation walk around the city. We visited the outsides of various temples – Sikh, Hindu, Brahman, Western (there is only one ATM in town, often with no money and a long line of pilgrims). We ended up having dinner back at the hotel and watched our second bollywood movie – an epic about a marriage of alliance between a Mughal king in Agra and a Rajput princess in Amer. I actually didn’t mind it. As is par for the course, it was horrendously cheesy, but there was some bread under it. The movie is over 4 hours long, so we await the final thrilling instalment tonight.
I woke at 4:45am the next morning (Kate chose to sleep in) for a bike ride and walk to a temple on top of a small mountain just outside Pushkar for views of the sunrise. So we rode through dark, shuttered streets, past the half-naked men sleeping outside a temple to a cafe where we dropped our bikes and made the steep climb up the mountain. It was a hard walk, nearly vertical towards the top and given my waning fitness a good morning workout. The sunrise was obscured by some clouds, but the views of waking Pushkar were expansive. We were also entertained/scared by a throng of lungi monkeys intent on baring their teeth and stealing what they could. I also had the largest glass of chai thus far.
We then had breakfast at a restaurant called ‘Honey and spice’ which had nice coffee and the best muesli I have yet tasted. There was no milk, just the thin, Indian yoghurt, dried figs, bananas, papyaya, apple, cashews, almonds, pomegranate, corn flakes and various other adornments. Actually I don’t think there was any Muesli in the muesli.
Upon returning to the hotel I discovered that I had managed to lock Kate in the room (in my drowsy efforts to make sure people would not walk in while she was asleep). She was not happy, but studiously working on improving the last blog entry.
We decided to go and re-do the mornings journey. So we jumped on the bikes again, returned to the cafe for some more coffee and muesli, and ascended the hill. It was much hotter and far more difficult – even the monkeys were sleeping in the shade. A number of more elderly pilgrims seemed to be having no such difficulty. We enjoyed the views and made our way back down. On our way we got briefly taking with some people who had come all the way from Kolkata to visit the temple (the temple itself is very small, just one room really).
I had my first encounter with a scam. On our way to the hill, some guy in a handicrafts store threw a cane basket in my path, which I, of course, ran over (although only a tiny part of it). He demanded money for the basket in course. We just rode off. But I thought this was a fairly enterprising scam – it wasn’t in the guidebook anyway!
Kate did some shopping while I minded the bikes and got talking with a very young man (10) called Vijay who crawled all over the bikes (and tried to crawl all over me). Exhausted and hot, we spent the remained of the afternoon beside the pool, and I had a quick nap.
Pushkar, despite all its peculiarities and weirdness, and a dry lake, is still very beautiful. The plains and small, peaky mountains that rise around it, are a perfect frame for this quaint, light-blue painted town.
Our love to you all.
Kate and Charles.
Jodhpur Udaipur
From the bus with the clown-horn we took a rickshaw past the wide-streets and spiffy jeans shops of the newer part of
We visited the fort first thing the next morning, although I got up at sunrise to take some photos from the rooftop. The fort was built in 1439 by an ancient ancestor of one of our former guides (Shakti Singh Rathore – Rathore is the surname of the ruling family). It is difficult to get across the enormity of this fort. It is built as a part of the hill, so it seems to grow out of the sandstone. As such it invokes all the awe of a mountain, but with ramparts and the largest cannons in
Inside it is a combination of intimidation and decadence. One walks up narrow, but extremely high outer passages that twist and turn at right angles so elephants could not get up momentum to crash through the doors. The doors themselves have huge metal spikes at elephant-head height to serve the same ends. Inside, however, there were many palaces, each serving a different purpose: the queens palace, kings palace, eating palace, resting in the sun palace, taking in the view palace, dancing palace etc. Most are adorned with artworks, stained glass windows and mirror tiles. All the palaces have been very well preserved, and a couple have been turned into museums, like one that had kept ancient Rajput weapons from simple swords to handcrafted, golden muskets used by warriors over the past 6 or seven hundred years. The audio-tour was filled with all sorts of juicy stories, from a guy that volunteered to bury himself alive in the foundations of the fort to overcome a curse from the hermit whose land the Maharaja stole to construct the fort, to the place where dozens of the Maharaja’s wives committed suicide by burning themselves alive upon his cremation fire because they (apparently) could not bear to exist without him.
The second thing one notices about
After the fort we followed the old city wall for a kilometre or so, past some barren and rocky hillsides, to the temple of one king that occupied the fort. It was completed around the 1800s and made entirely of local marble. It was very hot though and after taking a quick walk through the temple, we sat outside under a tree and ate pistachios.
It was quite a walk up (and consequently back down) and one industrious tuk-tuk driver had spotted the red faces and sweaty underarms and decided to follow us, offering tuk-tuk rides to the Sadar Bazzarr, where we were headed. He followed for quite some time, every 50 meters or so the group would say ‘no thankyou’, and he would jump in his tuk-tuk, take a back route and miraculously appear at the head of our hot and tired snake. The tail was weakening, and they took the deadly first step of bargaining. So he started at 100 rupees or so, and when he was declined, he politely waited ten metres and dropped his price 10 rupees. This went on for a while until a critical mass of exhausted people accepted his custom. I thought it was a job well done. I ended up walking down anyway, but I was impressed at the driver’s persistence. We have come across o number of extremely friendly and helpful tuk-tuk drivers (although are aware that an equal number can cause problems).
Anyway, by various means of transport we arrived at the Sadar Bazzar, a bustling and scorching place filled with trinkets, lassis ( the milkshake things) and beggars. We had a lassi where the locals do (it was pointed out us by someone else) which was nice and cold. We ran into someone from Torquay and took ourselves to the brink of heatstroke chatting in the sun.
I was going to have an omelette from a place recommended by lonely planet. We arrived at the stall, which had ‘reccomended by lonely planet’ all over it in blue paint. At the front of the stall was the lonely planet entry blown up for passers by to see. It read:
‘The omelette shop claims to go through 1000 eggs a day – the egg man has been doing his thing for over 30 years. Two tasty, spicy boiled eggs cost Rs 10, and an oily two-egg omelette with chilli, coriander and bread will cost Rs 15 but’
And it ended there... the last sentence had been covered with masking tape.
So I enquired, what was under the masking tape. He said:
‘oh, this is an older version, Lonely Planet has come out with a newer version, and here it is’. He handed me an A4 sheet in 14 point times new roman text that read:
‘The omelette shop claims to go through 1000 eggs a day – the egg man has been doing his thing for over 30 years. Two tasty, spicy boiled eggs cost Rs 10, and an oily two-egg omelette with chilli, coriander and bread will cost Rs 15.’
What was the missing line?
‘its not ideal for a queasy stomach’
What I don’t get is why you would leave the ‘but’ there.
Incredible
We took it pretty easy on the rooftop that afternoon, as we were both quite sunburnt and tired. The food was pretty average at the restaurant and the menu was incomprehensible (not because of any language difficultly, but because some meals could only be ordered in conjuction with other meals, it was, for example, impossible to have just a naan bread, one must also order mixed vegetables).
Kate and I did manage to take a rickshaw out to some gardens 8km out of town. It was a pleasant walk under the shade and past some 16th century tombs (these old ruins are all over
That evening we went out to a fairly up-market restaurant with a disco inside. Our group leader Vinit spoke about his charity he has just attained registration for with the government. A one week process, has taken over a year because he has refused to give burucratic bribes. In the end it wasn’t Vinit’s ethics that won out but an influential phone call, who knows how long it might have taken. He went on to describe the corruption which plagues charities and schooling. In particular he spoke of rural government run schools, where teachers have given up on attending, because they have not been paid in 3 years or more. He was for more upbeat about government schools in urban areas, however, where the quality of schooling has apparently increased dramatically. He described the regular creation of charities as a means to launder tax-free money. And although there are established government watchdogs, it does not take much for them to turn a blind-eye.
I ate chicken for the first time in
A couple more things about Jodphur, apart from being the usual cacophony of rubbish, dust, markets, beggars, cows and choruses of ‘hello... hello’, Jodhpur was also striking because of its sounds. Although there are many Muslim areas in
When the sun come up, however, the muslim prayers are drowned out by discotheque Hindi music blaring over the entire city, apparently from speakers in the temple.
The next morning we were up early to travel to Udaipur. On the itinery we were catching another local bus, but at some additional cost, the group opted to ‘upgrade’ and take private taxis. Private taxis’s are like taragos in make and quite comfortable on long trips. Taxis are best to take in groups though as the costs are far more than other transports. You are free to stop at your choice of toilets and sights, however in giving us the choice to stop a 5 hour trip turned 12 (with a short stop for a flat tire included). During the trip we visited the rural outskirts of Jodphur this included a potters village, a weaver’s village and a farmer’s village and one of the biggest examples of Jain architecture. Our visit to the three villages gave strange perspective on the very simple abodes we observed – little material observations such as a round faces and thick waists on the family members and the occasional solar panel made clear we were visiting those with wealth - a selected few who had been lucky enough to have made it on the tourist track. The whole area is in dire need of rain, being October the season has now passed and those without the luck of additional support will struggle into next year. At the farmers village they offered us opium, which, was, of course, declined in place of chai. Opium farmers are given government approval to grow a certain amount of opium for sale to pharmaceutical companies and of this a small portion for personal use, the retunrs on clean sales however but many exceed this and sell it on the black market. As with many things, even if one is caught, a little dosh can smooth the situation over. It was a glimpse into the bare life of people in rural india. We purchased a handwoven wool rug from a famous cooperative which has clientel from royalty to rockstars and even the odd economist – every shop where applicable keeps a plastic binder at arms length of newspaper and magazine clippings. The weavers’ plastic binder had photos of Prince Charles and Joseph Stigitz, i think The smashing Pumpkins were in there too. This kind of marketing is used by shops big or small. As mentioned above with the egg man the most lucraitive promo is achived through a Lonely Planet (and its variations i.e. ‘Lonly Planet’) mention. Painted signs and printo9uts are displayed loud and proud on shops fronts and if you don’t know the publication you may have been reviewed and recommended in a tag such as ‘recomend by book’ will suffice.
We reached Udaipur in the late evening after travelling all day, and visiting a Jain temple. Women were not supposed to enter the temple if on their menstrual cycle because the temple was to remain ‘pure’. There also was a stone elephant that, with 100% success we were told, granted you a wish if you crawled under it. The temple was extremely beautiful with nearly a dozen domes and hundreds of pillars all individually carved. Jain people do not believe in the killing of any animals (or people, or destroying things generally), so someone asked the question – ‘didn’t you have to clear the forest to build the temple?’. No they did not. A special god came down from heaven and parted the forest, so not a microbe was harmed. ..
Udaipur is in the hills. Within minutes you pass from shimmering desert to temperate rainforest and granite peaks. The air becomes cool and damp.
Udaipur is a city built on a lake and surrounded by hills. It was chosen many centuries ago as a city site because of its defensive merits. Udaipur is also the place where octopussy was filmed and every restaurant in town screens the movie at 7pm.
The main feature of the town is the lake, and the three palaces, two of which are on the lake. You may have heard of the ‘lake palalce’ – its pretty famous and goes for a cool US$3500 a night. The Kings palace – that runs down to the ghats (the steps approaching a lake) – still houses the royal family. The ghats are filled with women washing saris and men bathing (apt symbol of gender realtions in India, and elsewhere). There are also many temples down by the lake, including one very odd little one. In the hollow of a tree was a little marble knob (there really is no other word for it, but it was like a cylinder with a rounded, smoothed end on it) that is, according to the story, one of twelve parts of a Hindu god’s penis that was severed and dismembered by an embittered wife. However, these penis-stones contain a certain power it is said, so people worship them.
Acutally there is an interesting myth behind the fertility of the Punjab. According to the story, one god (I really can remember all there names, there are 300,000 of them) propositioned the female god of the Himalayan hills. She refused, and as a result the male god roped her up and dragged her body down the hills into northern india, leaving her body parts to enrich the soil.
In another story, the ganges is the menstrual cycle of one of the hills gods.
Most of India has this constant background smell. It not unpleasant and not pleasant either. Its a mixture of the incense from the shops, sewerage, dogs, cow poo, sweat and baking rubbish. Udaipur is different. For the most part it is very clean, compared to the rest of india. People are out every morning sweeping and tidying their roadsides and Udaipurians are apparently very proud of their cleanliness. The exception, unfortunately, seems to be the lake where great clumps of water bottles, coke bottles, plystyreme, ceremonial flowers and spent coconuts get entangled in the algae. But even then, there are bands of volunteers (of which our group leader is a part) that go out on selected Sundays, wade into the river, and pull out tractor-loads of rubbish.
Anyway, the cleanliness gives Udaipur a completely different olfactory setup. Instead of the background pungency, you can walk around most of the town without noticing any smells. But from time to time there are these gagging sour patches that smell like stale urine.
Udaipur is also quieter. I went and sat down beside the lake for a while one afternoon and noticed the absence of car horns.
Our first day in Udaipur was a full one. First we visited the King’s palace, and while it was very old, I was getting a little palaced out. We then took a walk down to the lake. After lunch we headed up to the Monsoon Palace – a perfect hillside spot for the Royal family during the heavy rain season. The view was quite spectacular o9f the lake and the 5 star hotels which sit in it with high financial walls surrounding them. We watched the sunset and some group members express great disgust at the fading native animal information posters inside the main hall which advertised Udaipurs rich ecosystem now extinct and dangerously numbered. I never knew India had Lions? This evening Vinit invited all 12 of us into his family home where we were treated to traditional south Indian cusine – everyone was rapted and those who had stuck to plain rice and french fries were pleseantly surprised. South food is much cleaner and consist of steamed rice paddies and coconut chuntneys – Kate and I managed on strong host insistence 11 rice paddies between us. Hospitatlity is god like in India – similar to our village wedding experinece in Chamba Valley in the hills. It is believed that a guest is like a god and must be treated accordingly. Charatcerised by eating first, been offered copuious amouts of food and obsolved from any effort to assist in either preparation or clean-up. We looked through family photos some very familiar 70s shots of Vinits dad had strong similaries to all dads of that time – dad and colin it could have been you in bvell bottoms with aviatars and mos. After all this we were treated to ice-cream. Kate was given a very slow and cautious lift (as per my instructions) on Vinit’s motorbike back to the hotel. The rest of us crammed into tuk tuks and cars.
The next morning we took a relaxing boat ride around the lake and saw the palace up close. You cant get onto the palace-island bit unless you are prepared to part with 3000RS ($75) before you even buy anything. We had breakfast at a German Bakery and ate cake and coffee. The coffee was poor (despite lonely planet’s strongest recommendations) but the brownies and cinnamon rolls were delicious. Kate took an miniature painting class, and I took a North Indian cooking class in the afternoon. We sat out at a lakeside restaurant for the sunset and I lost my first game of chess to Vinit. I repeated this performance on the train the very next day.
Very early this morning we left for Pushkar – a no alcohol, no meat, no eggs, no kissing lakeside town north-east of
We are off for a walk around town and some dinner.
One last thing. In our hotel in
‘who cares who wins’.
I assume this is not the motto of the whole Indian Army. What a big difference a little comma can have.
Our love to you all. Our phone is out of battery and credit, and we cant find the charger, but hopefully I will get my hands on one today.
We miss you.
Love Kate and Charles.
Saturday 10 October 2009
Into Rajasthan
Hi All,
Sorry I have not written in some time, again, we have been very busy every day, with barely a minute between activities to spare. As such, I have written this over the past 7 days or so, in stages.
We have traded the mountains for the desert: traded fresh, crisp air for dry, hot gusts; rainforest for sparse shrubs hunching in the wind; huts nestled into the mountainside for boxy sandstone houses jutting from the baking earth; unassuming, plain-clothed men for deep-set faces, luminous turbans, tweaked moustaches and glittering adornments.
We have moved into Rajasthan. From what I can gather, Rajasthan is a place of immense pride and history. For much of its past, Rajasthan has been divided into smaller kingdoms with all the palace intrigue (alliances, marriages, enormous wealth and great battles) one associates with these kingdoms. Such was the Rajput’s autonomy and independence, that it took great cajoling for the Rajputs to even join the Indian federation at partition in 1947. I was interested to learn that the current dispute in Kashmir goes back to an indecisive Hindu king ruling over a Moslem majority that ummed and arrrhed about whether to become a part of India or Pakistan. A Pakistani invasion forced his hand, but the uncertainty remains.
More of Rajasthan later. After our last post we re-circumnavigated the lake in our giant swan. After we had been to a pastry shop, i had my first, very brief, bout of nausea. It came on very quickly, but the paddle around the lake fixed it. As you would expect, many of the bodies of water in India are horrendously polluted. The main river that runs through Delhi, the Jumna (pronounced Yum-na) has been variously described as ‘black ooze’ and ‘filth’. Industrial waste, sewerage and the aftermath of festivals have all poisoned the river, possible beyond repair according to the media reports here. Surprisingly, water quality has been rapidly declining over the past five years. There was an article in the paper recently detailing the level of some bacteria in the waterways. Even the normally clean Himalayan parts of the river are becoming polluted. A long digression but you might expect that Nanital lake, a small, standing body of water would have suffered a similar fate. Not so. There is the standard rubbish here and there, (not as much as in the rest of India), but the government has come up with this clever way of aerating the water. They have actually dug under the lake and bored a series of airholes at the bottom to pump oxygen through. As such, the water is relatively clean and fish are abundant.
Another thing about littering. Many (certainly not all, I don’t want to pigeon-hole) Indian people just throw their rubbish whenever they happen to not need it anymore. We were on the toy train to Shimla, moving past pristine hills and the most uninterrupted greenage we had yet seen, and these two guys would just finish their lunch, and piece by piece throw their rubbish out the train window. It happens alot. It problematic enough for it to top a list of 10 bad habits people in Delhi have to fix before the 2010 commonwealth games.
We walked back to the hotel and the extravagant construction out the front of our room was almost complete. All the surrounding tress were draped with fairy lights of blue, yellow and red, in one corner of the property two gyus were standing with a hookah (I don’t know what was in it, probably scented tobacco). Roughly in the middle there was a huge, carpeted entertaining areas with dozens of tables, room for a band, all floodlit. We think the whole arrangement would have cost in excess of $100,000. It was for a wedding.
I managed to negotiate a taxi driver down from horrendously expensive to ridiculously expensive for the drive back to Kathgodam. We ate our final dinner and packed.
Most of the next day was spent on the train back to Delhi, when we called. We sat opposite a professor of management and his wife and were entertained by some very energetic kids climbing all over the sleeper carriages, throwing rubbish everywhere, and practicing their English on us. One girl was fond of throwing her (almost) empty packet of chips down near (sometimes on!) us and pleading ‘sorry! Sorry!, oh I am so very very sorry’.
We arrived back in Delhi. The guy at the prepaid rickshaw stand said that I could not buy a ticket to Karol Bagh, but somehow, five seconds later that was possible for Kate. It could have been Kate, or it could have been the policeman standing beside her. Either way, we got in a rickshaw through the choking clog of old Delhi. The driver didn’t really know where the suburb we were staying in was, so I figured he wouldn’t have much chance of knowing where the hotel was. He dropped us at the metro station at Karol Bagh. Karol Bagh is a big place and there are no street names or numbers and we walked around looking confused, accepting every piece of advice we could (while also being a sitting duck for the men selling 2m laminated maps of India and head-massage instruments) getting sent back and forth until someone from intrepid travel realised we must be looking for one of our hotels and guided us there.
The hotel was nice and clean. We met our group for this second part of the trip. In all we are 13 people (including the group leader): 2 Australian ladies in their 50s or so, 2 Australian guys from Melbourne, about 19, a couple from England/Australia, 2 British girls around 20, one Russian lady, and one solo-travelling Australian. Our group leader is a 29 year old guy from Rajasthan (all group leaders seem to be from the warrior caste in Rajasthan).
That evening we went out to dinner with Sam and Kristine (the lady we met on our first tour). Kristine is off to Darjeeling, but we will probably see her again in Goa. Sam is the property manager for intrepid. We had a great night over dinner, a beer and some coffee afterwards. I had the mix vegetable and a sumptuous, buttery garlic naan. I ate meat again too, as Sam ordered mutton and shared it around.
The next morning we headed out for the old Delhi walk of the Mosque, the spice markets and the Sikh temples. The weather was much cooler and overcast. Even though we had already done the walk, Kate and I enjoyed re-doing it, now being a little more comfortable in the onslaught. We returned to the mosque and re-ascended the spire. This time I was able to fully appreciate how enormous and magnificent is the red fort, and for the first time get a feel for what a more ancient Delhi would have looked like. I noticed that the mosque was connected to a market which was itself connected to the red fort, all built in, now smoothed, deep red sandstone. I was amazed to find out that Delhi had been continuously inhabited since possibly 3000BC. Many places rise and fall, but Delhi has been central to history on the subcontinent for many thousands of years.
On the walk through the spice market, we passed through a section for festival shopping with bright flowers dangling overhead. We stopped for a parantha at a tiny restaurant that Jehan Nehru ate. We stopped also for a ‘lassi’ - a cold, yoghurt-based drink which is the closest thing here to a good banana smoothie. We bought some almonds and pistachios for the 19 hour train journey ahead that afternoon.
The train was not as bad as I was expecting. The sleeper trains and generally comfortable, clean and air conditioned. We spent the afternoon and evening all chatting and getting to know one another and we slept reasonably well. In the morning the conversations continued and we arrived in Jaislamer surprised that nearly a full day earlier we had stepped onto he train in Delhi.
We arrived in Jaislamer at around 12pm. Apparently it was 42-45 degrees when we arrived, but I am struggling to tell the difference between 38 degrees and 45 degrees. It’s all just damn hot. Jaislamer is a different kind of hot though. Warm winds blow across the desert and the air is drier. In Delhi it is both hot and sticky. The heat in Jaislamer is more draining thasn you think too – a short walk through the streets leaves your mouth sticky and your head dizzy.
Jaislamier is used to be an important town on the Silk Road. It’s near the India-Pakistan border in central-west Rajasthan. The centrepiece of the town is a 12th century sandstone fort that still houses 5000 people. It is like stepping back in time, the streets are narrow, gold sandstone that has worn smooth over nearly a thousand years. Most of the buildings are as old, and retain all the delicate carvings of the time. In its prime, people in Jaislamier used to be extremely rich from looting and trading with caravans on the silk route. Wealthy merchants built these houses called ‘Havelis’ (mansions) that still stand today. The bigger, more grand and more beautiful your Haveli, the wealther you were. Much of the wealth and decadence is still apparent in the buildings, but the locals have taken to looting tourists instead of caravans these days.
Jaislmer reminds me a lot of Venice, minus the water and in the middle of the desert. Every corner is another postcard-photo. The fort at Jaslaimer is actually sinking into the sand (maybe that’s why it reminds me of Venice too). Because of poor drainage under the fort (which they are trying to fix), the fort will eventually disappear.
After arriving in Jaislamer, we drove to our hotel. We are staying inside the fort and the rooftop has views over all of Jaislamer town, the enormous wind farms and Indian army bases that surround the town, and the desert beyond. Soon after arriving, we took an orientation walk around the fort and into the town below.
I had enormous expectations about Jaslamier - being out in the desert, staying in a 12th century fort, watching a sunset (all a little touristy i know) were parts of our journey i had been most looking forwards to. I can truly say that it lives up to all expectations. As with all of india, there are sad and disturbing parts, and for the first time, some very touristy parts (there are a lot of westerners here, more than we have seen all trip), but the beauty of the place is immense.
Most of the fort has been preserved – you walk along the golden-cobbled streets and buildings, past stately white, Brahmin cows luxuriating in the shade, to be confronted at every corner with a building, rampart, or a temple hundreds of years old and decorated with the most precise and intricate carvings. At the same time there are children collecting rubbish and begging for money, shopkeepers yelling ‘come and spend your money here’, ‘come and see many beautiful and wonderful things’, women dressed in sequined red, hooded saris selling anklets, and open sewers that waft from time to time. One guy even just said ‘come into my shop and let me rip you off’. Business must be good. Then you will turn an innocuous looking corner that opens out to a view across the desert.
That afternoon, when it was cooler, we took an orientation walk through the streets, past a Jain temple, to a cannon aiming out over the plains, past the market outside the fort and to the ATM. Most of the shopkeepers knew we were on such a walk and would shout ‘when you finish tour, you come to my shop, bring your friends’. From what I can glean, Jaislamer survives mostly on tourism, and a little from the many army bases and wind farms.
We returned to the rooftop restaurant in time to watch the sunset, but the dust and haze over the horizon had blotted it out. We sat on some cushions at a low table and had a drink, ate dinner and listened to the group leader tell us the Sri-Lanka abduction story (although in far more detail). At festival time, they can take 5 days to tell the story. An interesting addition to this version was the presence of ‘deamon faced Lankans’ that are still inhabiting Sri-Lanka today. Again with the racism. We also talked alot among one another and listened to one of an English girl’s (Natasha’s) hilariously animated imitations of her Greek father. She in turn was inconsolable at many of another lady’s (Leanne’s) Australianisms.
The next morning we visited some of the Haveli’s around town. In total we visited two. The biggest one stood probably 3 stories tall with its entire facades covered in carvings of peacocks, elephants and various other patterning down to the detail of a fingernail. It was nice, but the whole town is so captivating that I was getting a little over-captivated, where something that is rightly stunning gets a ‘yep that was okay’.
In the afternoon we had free time, so Kate and I stimulated the local economy. We not doubt were horrendously ripped off (and there are certain people who have no qualms about telling you) but bought a couple of shirts, Kate bought a nice skirt (for $3 or so) and a leather water-holder (for the camel trek thing). I am fairly confident about conducting the full bargaining process in Hindi, but it a battle to get them to even speak Hindi, so touristy is the place.
The leader had organised for the entire group to be dressed in Rajasthan garb, to go and watch the sun fall over the fort from outside the town. So I was dressed in ‘pyjama’ pants and a loose shirt with a rainbow turban on, while Kate was decked out a full green and maroon full Sari. Kate looked exquisite, I looked like an imposter. I now think all of this was organised for the leader’s amusement, as we walked outside the fort past the chuckling and jeering of the locals. Others enjoyed it, and, yes now I am not doing it, I can see how it was funny, but it was among the most humiliating, cheesy, embarrassing, twee 30 minutes I can remember.
Anyway, we watched the sun cast its last over the fort and took a taxi to the restaurant we were eating at. Again, it was a magnificent place, a blocky, sandstone structure a few kilometres from the fort, but set right in the desert with views back of the fort rising over the town. I did my best to take some photos, and we’ll see how they are when they go up. We chatted and shared a drink and ordered our meal. Then, from below the balcony we were sitting from came the undulations of a drum, then another, then some cymbals and some other instrument.
I hate dancing.
At first it was okay, an Indian lady performed a traditional dance with all the hand waving and graceful movements. One of the ladies in the group who is prone to prefomrmative outbursts ascended the stage and started dancing and playing instruments. That is fine, I was happy to leave it to the professionals and the un-inhibited. Then more people got up, and eventually the Indian lady descended and I was up there with Kate gyrating and fumbling, turning out of time and waving my hands like the queen on amphetamines. All in my stupid rainbow turban and pyjama pants.
Afterwards everyone said, Kate you were so good up there...
Unfortunately Kate’s night went a little downhill from her graceful outfits and dancing. As we were about to eat dinner, Kate had to hastily find a bathroom and re-vistited some of the day. She is fine this morning (the next morning) but we went straight home in a rickshaw, she had some water and slept for 12 hous or so. I think it may have been a little heat-stroke.
Consequently, we have took it easy the next day. We met up with our old group leader, Shakti, for lunch and just chatted and drank tea sitting on the rooftop in the breeze. We then slowly packed for the camel trek, which was die to leave at 3pm.
We took jeeps about 45km or so out of Jasliameir, to a point where the camels were waiting for us. In all there were 12 camels (one for each of us) groaning, urinitating, farting and defecating to greet our arrival. Kate ended up on the biggest camel – a golden yellow, quite majestic camel – while ended up on the smallest and youngest camel who could be yet let off its owners leash (it must still have harboured dreams of freedom). We then rode out across the plains for 2 hours or so.
The landscape started with dark, hard, rocky land with leathery green shrubs that opened like hands from the earth. In time we passed goat herders and agricultural fields that had not seen rain in years. (the monsoon has been very bad in rajasthan, but here in particular) and tiny, barely inhabited, sandstone and thatched hut villages. We rode past the windfarms and ubiquitous mobile phone towers (even when we were camping, I had full mobile phone reception) until the landscape changed to rolling, windswept sand-dunes.
The guide responsible for my camel (and two others that did not need such close supervision) was a wuite, but happy guy from one of the surrounding villages. He was 23 had been recently married to a girl that he had never met. The parents had arranged the marriage when he was 19. He had never been to school, and did not know how to read or write, but spoke excellent English that he had gleaned from tourists.
We stopped at a camp not far into the sand dunes. The cam itself was set in a small clearing int he dunes, but completely surrounded by them (for wind-protection, as we later found out). We descended from the camels and walked atop one of the dunes to watche the sunset. On arrival there were fresh pakoras and cold drinks waiting for us (neither of which were expected). For the evening we sat and chatted while watching the desert overtake the deepening sun. I really do like sunsets, and this one was memorable – truly a highlight of the trip thus far.
After the sunset (it took a long time for it to become fully dark, it was eight or so before the stars were out in full) there was more dancing and music with the same ridiculous thrashing and fitting on my behalf (minus the turban). We ate a farily simple meal of chipatis and some mixed vegetables at aounrd 10pm. Kate and I then dragged our stretcher beds up on top of the dunes and went to sleep under the stars.
Unfortunately, I did not sleep well. The breeze became more gusty and cold. By morning it had left a crust of sand on my backpack. The moon was nearly full, immuminating the dester liek day and the morning dew was absorbed by our blankets, dampening them and making it even more cold. I was in the semi-concious sleep state for most of the night – aware enough that it was cold and windy, but not aware enough to do anything about it.
We missed the morning sunrise because of cloud-cover and ate a few pieces of toast before riding back out on the camels.
At the hotel I was tired and riddled with sand monsters that were crawling all over me. We showered, I visited the ATM and had a nice conversation with a guy who, all the time was dicing onions as thin as paper. There were a lot of army personell in the streets, on leave I think.
By 1:30 we were on a bus with a ridiculously loud clown horn to Jodphur – the blue city. This bus was more luxiurous than the hills buses. We had reserved seats, although one must interpret ‘reserved’ with some liberalism in India. We had a brief incident with one very aggressive young man who tried to push his way onto a couple of seats without asking, and really freaking out one girl ion our group. It’s like anywhere else – a little politeness goes a long way and if people ask, generally evenyone is more than willing to share.
Our visit to Jaslamier was incredible, and everything I expected it to be. We have been in Jodhpur for a day as a write this, and already I am taken with the place. All I will say is that it is hot. In Jaslamier, you feel as though you are in an oven. In Jodhpur, it feels like you are on a fry-pan.
Love to you all,
Charlesand Kate.
Sorry I have not written in some time, again, we have been very busy every day, with barely a minute between activities to spare. As such, I have written this over the past 7 days or so, in stages.
We have traded the mountains for the desert: traded fresh, crisp air for dry, hot gusts; rainforest for sparse shrubs hunching in the wind; huts nestled into the mountainside for boxy sandstone houses jutting from the baking earth; unassuming, plain-clothed men for deep-set faces, luminous turbans, tweaked moustaches and glittering adornments.
We have moved into Rajasthan. From what I can gather, Rajasthan is a place of immense pride and history. For much of its past, Rajasthan has been divided into smaller kingdoms with all the palace intrigue (alliances, marriages, enormous wealth and great battles) one associates with these kingdoms. Such was the Rajput’s autonomy and independence, that it took great cajoling for the Rajputs to even join the Indian federation at partition in 1947. I was interested to learn that the current dispute in Kashmir goes back to an indecisive Hindu king ruling over a Moslem majority that ummed and arrrhed about whether to become a part of India or Pakistan. A Pakistani invasion forced his hand, but the uncertainty remains.
More of Rajasthan later. After our last post we re-circumnavigated the lake in our giant swan. After we had been to a pastry shop, i had my first, very brief, bout of nausea. It came on very quickly, but the paddle around the lake fixed it. As you would expect, many of the bodies of water in India are horrendously polluted. The main river that runs through Delhi, the Jumna (pronounced Yum-na) has been variously described as ‘black ooze’ and ‘filth’. Industrial waste, sewerage and the aftermath of festivals have all poisoned the river, possible beyond repair according to the media reports here. Surprisingly, water quality has been rapidly declining over the past five years. There was an article in the paper recently detailing the level of some bacteria in the waterways. Even the normally clean Himalayan parts of the river are becoming polluted. A long digression but you might expect that Nanital lake, a small, standing body of water would have suffered a similar fate. Not so. There is the standard rubbish here and there, (not as much as in the rest of India), but the government has come up with this clever way of aerating the water. They have actually dug under the lake and bored a series of airholes at the bottom to pump oxygen through. As such, the water is relatively clean and fish are abundant.
Another thing about littering. Many (certainly not all, I don’t want to pigeon-hole) Indian people just throw their rubbish whenever they happen to not need it anymore. We were on the toy train to Shimla, moving past pristine hills and the most uninterrupted greenage we had yet seen, and these two guys would just finish their lunch, and piece by piece throw their rubbish out the train window. It happens alot. It problematic enough for it to top a list of 10 bad habits people in Delhi have to fix before the 2010 commonwealth games.
We walked back to the hotel and the extravagant construction out the front of our room was almost complete. All the surrounding tress were draped with fairy lights of blue, yellow and red, in one corner of the property two gyus were standing with a hookah (I don’t know what was in it, probably scented tobacco). Roughly in the middle there was a huge, carpeted entertaining areas with dozens of tables, room for a band, all floodlit. We think the whole arrangement would have cost in excess of $100,000. It was for a wedding.
I managed to negotiate a taxi driver down from horrendously expensive to ridiculously expensive for the drive back to Kathgodam. We ate our final dinner and packed.
Most of the next day was spent on the train back to Delhi, when we called. We sat opposite a professor of management and his wife and were entertained by some very energetic kids climbing all over the sleeper carriages, throwing rubbish everywhere, and practicing their English on us. One girl was fond of throwing her (almost) empty packet of chips down near (sometimes on!) us and pleading ‘sorry! Sorry!, oh I am so very very sorry’.
We arrived back in Delhi. The guy at the prepaid rickshaw stand said that I could not buy a ticket to Karol Bagh, but somehow, five seconds later that was possible for Kate. It could have been Kate, or it could have been the policeman standing beside her. Either way, we got in a rickshaw through the choking clog of old Delhi. The driver didn’t really know where the suburb we were staying in was, so I figured he wouldn’t have much chance of knowing where the hotel was. He dropped us at the metro station at Karol Bagh. Karol Bagh is a big place and there are no street names or numbers and we walked around looking confused, accepting every piece of advice we could (while also being a sitting duck for the men selling 2m laminated maps of India and head-massage instruments) getting sent back and forth until someone from intrepid travel realised we must be looking for one of our hotels and guided us there.
The hotel was nice and clean. We met our group for this second part of the trip. In all we are 13 people (including the group leader): 2 Australian ladies in their 50s or so, 2 Australian guys from Melbourne, about 19, a couple from England/Australia, 2 British girls around 20, one Russian lady, and one solo-travelling Australian. Our group leader is a 29 year old guy from Rajasthan (all group leaders seem to be from the warrior caste in Rajasthan).
That evening we went out to dinner with Sam and Kristine (the lady we met on our first tour). Kristine is off to Darjeeling, but we will probably see her again in Goa. Sam is the property manager for intrepid. We had a great night over dinner, a beer and some coffee afterwards. I had the mix vegetable and a sumptuous, buttery garlic naan. I ate meat again too, as Sam ordered mutton and shared it around.
The next morning we headed out for the old Delhi walk of the Mosque, the spice markets and the Sikh temples. The weather was much cooler and overcast. Even though we had already done the walk, Kate and I enjoyed re-doing it, now being a little more comfortable in the onslaught. We returned to the mosque and re-ascended the spire. This time I was able to fully appreciate how enormous and magnificent is the red fort, and for the first time get a feel for what a more ancient Delhi would have looked like. I noticed that the mosque was connected to a market which was itself connected to the red fort, all built in, now smoothed, deep red sandstone. I was amazed to find out that Delhi had been continuously inhabited since possibly 3000BC. Many places rise and fall, but Delhi has been central to history on the subcontinent for many thousands of years.
On the walk through the spice market, we passed through a section for festival shopping with bright flowers dangling overhead. We stopped for a parantha at a tiny restaurant that Jehan Nehru ate. We stopped also for a ‘lassi’ - a cold, yoghurt-based drink which is the closest thing here to a good banana smoothie. We bought some almonds and pistachios for the 19 hour train journey ahead that afternoon.
The train was not as bad as I was expecting. The sleeper trains and generally comfortable, clean and air conditioned. We spent the afternoon and evening all chatting and getting to know one another and we slept reasonably well. In the morning the conversations continued and we arrived in Jaislamer surprised that nearly a full day earlier we had stepped onto he train in Delhi.
We arrived in Jaislamer at around 12pm. Apparently it was 42-45 degrees when we arrived, but I am struggling to tell the difference between 38 degrees and 45 degrees. It’s all just damn hot. Jaislamer is a different kind of hot though. Warm winds blow across the desert and the air is drier. In Delhi it is both hot and sticky. The heat in Jaislamer is more draining thasn you think too – a short walk through the streets leaves your mouth sticky and your head dizzy.
Jaislamier is used to be an important town on the Silk Road. It’s near the India-Pakistan border in central-west Rajasthan. The centrepiece of the town is a 12th century sandstone fort that still houses 5000 people. It is like stepping back in time, the streets are narrow, gold sandstone that has worn smooth over nearly a thousand years. Most of the buildings are as old, and retain all the delicate carvings of the time. In its prime, people in Jaislamier used to be extremely rich from looting and trading with caravans on the silk route. Wealthy merchants built these houses called ‘Havelis’ (mansions) that still stand today. The bigger, more grand and more beautiful your Haveli, the wealther you were. Much of the wealth and decadence is still apparent in the buildings, but the locals have taken to looting tourists instead of caravans these days.
Jaislmer reminds me a lot of Venice, minus the water and in the middle of the desert. Every corner is another postcard-photo. The fort at Jaslaimer is actually sinking into the sand (maybe that’s why it reminds me of Venice too). Because of poor drainage under the fort (which they are trying to fix), the fort will eventually disappear.
After arriving in Jaislamer, we drove to our hotel. We are staying inside the fort and the rooftop has views over all of Jaislamer town, the enormous wind farms and Indian army bases that surround the town, and the desert beyond. Soon after arriving, we took an orientation walk around the fort and into the town below.
I had enormous expectations about Jaslamier - being out in the desert, staying in a 12th century fort, watching a sunset (all a little touristy i know) were parts of our journey i had been most looking forwards to. I can truly say that it lives up to all expectations. As with all of india, there are sad and disturbing parts, and for the first time, some very touristy parts (there are a lot of westerners here, more than we have seen all trip), but the beauty of the place is immense.
Most of the fort has been preserved – you walk along the golden-cobbled streets and buildings, past stately white, Brahmin cows luxuriating in the shade, to be confronted at every corner with a building, rampart, or a temple hundreds of years old and decorated with the most precise and intricate carvings. At the same time there are children collecting rubbish and begging for money, shopkeepers yelling ‘come and spend your money here’, ‘come and see many beautiful and wonderful things’, women dressed in sequined red, hooded saris selling anklets, and open sewers that waft from time to time. One guy even just said ‘come into my shop and let me rip you off’. Business must be good. Then you will turn an innocuous looking corner that opens out to a view across the desert.
That afternoon, when it was cooler, we took an orientation walk through the streets, past a Jain temple, to a cannon aiming out over the plains, past the market outside the fort and to the ATM. Most of the shopkeepers knew we were on such a walk and would shout ‘when you finish tour, you come to my shop, bring your friends’. From what I can glean, Jaislamer survives mostly on tourism, and a little from the many army bases and wind farms.
We returned to the rooftop restaurant in time to watch the sunset, but the dust and haze over the horizon had blotted it out. We sat on some cushions at a low table and had a drink, ate dinner and listened to the group leader tell us the Sri-Lanka abduction story (although in far more detail). At festival time, they can take 5 days to tell the story. An interesting addition to this version was the presence of ‘deamon faced Lankans’ that are still inhabiting Sri-Lanka today. Again with the racism. We also talked alot among one another and listened to one of an English girl’s (Natasha’s) hilariously animated imitations of her Greek father. She in turn was inconsolable at many of another lady’s (Leanne’s) Australianisms.
The next morning we visited some of the Haveli’s around town. In total we visited two. The biggest one stood probably 3 stories tall with its entire facades covered in carvings of peacocks, elephants and various other patterning down to the detail of a fingernail. It was nice, but the whole town is so captivating that I was getting a little over-captivated, where something that is rightly stunning gets a ‘yep that was okay’.
In the afternoon we had free time, so Kate and I stimulated the local economy. We not doubt were horrendously ripped off (and there are certain people who have no qualms about telling you) but bought a couple of shirts, Kate bought a nice skirt (for $3 or so) and a leather water-holder (for the camel trek thing). I am fairly confident about conducting the full bargaining process in Hindi, but it a battle to get them to even speak Hindi, so touristy is the place.
The leader had organised for the entire group to be dressed in Rajasthan garb, to go and watch the sun fall over the fort from outside the town. So I was dressed in ‘pyjama’ pants and a loose shirt with a rainbow turban on, while Kate was decked out a full green and maroon full Sari. Kate looked exquisite, I looked like an imposter. I now think all of this was organised for the leader’s amusement, as we walked outside the fort past the chuckling and jeering of the locals. Others enjoyed it, and, yes now I am not doing it, I can see how it was funny, but it was among the most humiliating, cheesy, embarrassing, twee 30 minutes I can remember.
Anyway, we watched the sun cast its last over the fort and took a taxi to the restaurant we were eating at. Again, it was a magnificent place, a blocky, sandstone structure a few kilometres from the fort, but set right in the desert with views back of the fort rising over the town. I did my best to take some photos, and we’ll see how they are when they go up. We chatted and shared a drink and ordered our meal. Then, from below the balcony we were sitting from came the undulations of a drum, then another, then some cymbals and some other instrument.
I hate dancing.
At first it was okay, an Indian lady performed a traditional dance with all the hand waving and graceful movements. One of the ladies in the group who is prone to prefomrmative outbursts ascended the stage and started dancing and playing instruments. That is fine, I was happy to leave it to the professionals and the un-inhibited. Then more people got up, and eventually the Indian lady descended and I was up there with Kate gyrating and fumbling, turning out of time and waving my hands like the queen on amphetamines. All in my stupid rainbow turban and pyjama pants.
Afterwards everyone said, Kate you were so good up there...
Unfortunately Kate’s night went a little downhill from her graceful outfits and dancing. As we were about to eat dinner, Kate had to hastily find a bathroom and re-vistited some of the day. She is fine this morning (the next morning) but we went straight home in a rickshaw, she had some water and slept for 12 hous or so. I think it may have been a little heat-stroke.
Consequently, we have took it easy the next day. We met up with our old group leader, Shakti, for lunch and just chatted and drank tea sitting on the rooftop in the breeze. We then slowly packed for the camel trek, which was die to leave at 3pm.
We took jeeps about 45km or so out of Jasliameir, to a point where the camels were waiting for us. In all there were 12 camels (one for each of us) groaning, urinitating, farting and defecating to greet our arrival. Kate ended up on the biggest camel – a golden yellow, quite majestic camel – while ended up on the smallest and youngest camel who could be yet let off its owners leash (it must still have harboured dreams of freedom). We then rode out across the plains for 2 hours or so.
The landscape started with dark, hard, rocky land with leathery green shrubs that opened like hands from the earth. In time we passed goat herders and agricultural fields that had not seen rain in years. (the monsoon has been very bad in rajasthan, but here in particular) and tiny, barely inhabited, sandstone and thatched hut villages. We rode past the windfarms and ubiquitous mobile phone towers (even when we were camping, I had full mobile phone reception) until the landscape changed to rolling, windswept sand-dunes.
The guide responsible for my camel (and two others that did not need such close supervision) was a wuite, but happy guy from one of the surrounding villages. He was 23 had been recently married to a girl that he had never met. The parents had arranged the marriage when he was 19. He had never been to school, and did not know how to read or write, but spoke excellent English that he had gleaned from tourists.
We stopped at a camp not far into the sand dunes. The cam itself was set in a small clearing int he dunes, but completely surrounded by them (for wind-protection, as we later found out). We descended from the camels and walked atop one of the dunes to watche the sunset. On arrival there were fresh pakoras and cold drinks waiting for us (neither of which were expected). For the evening we sat and chatted while watching the desert overtake the deepening sun. I really do like sunsets, and this one was memorable – truly a highlight of the trip thus far.
After the sunset (it took a long time for it to become fully dark, it was eight or so before the stars were out in full) there was more dancing and music with the same ridiculous thrashing and fitting on my behalf (minus the turban). We ate a farily simple meal of chipatis and some mixed vegetables at aounrd 10pm. Kate and I then dragged our stretcher beds up on top of the dunes and went to sleep under the stars.
Unfortunately, I did not sleep well. The breeze became more gusty and cold. By morning it had left a crust of sand on my backpack. The moon was nearly full, immuminating the dester liek day and the morning dew was absorbed by our blankets, dampening them and making it even more cold. I was in the semi-concious sleep state for most of the night – aware enough that it was cold and windy, but not aware enough to do anything about it.
We missed the morning sunrise because of cloud-cover and ate a few pieces of toast before riding back out on the camels.
At the hotel I was tired and riddled with sand monsters that were crawling all over me. We showered, I visited the ATM and had a nice conversation with a guy who, all the time was dicing onions as thin as paper. There were a lot of army personell in the streets, on leave I think.
By 1:30 we were on a bus with a ridiculously loud clown horn to Jodphur – the blue city. This bus was more luxiurous than the hills buses. We had reserved seats, although one must interpret ‘reserved’ with some liberalism in India. We had a brief incident with one very aggressive young man who tried to push his way onto a couple of seats without asking, and really freaking out one girl ion our group. It’s like anywhere else – a little politeness goes a long way and if people ask, generally evenyone is more than willing to share.
Our visit to Jaslamier was incredible, and everything I expected it to be. We have been in Jodhpur for a day as a write this, and already I am taken with the place. All I will say is that it is hot. In Jaslamier, you feel as though you are in an oven. In Jodhpur, it feels like you are on a fry-pan.
Love to you all,
Charlesand Kate.
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