Another Day, Another Ruin

Congratulations if you got through the last post. I'll try to be more brief this time.

We are in Orchha and leave for Delhi tonight. The India portion of our trip is more or less over, we leave for Sri Lanka on the 29th. I have just had a lunch of mutton, bought fresh from the market and a genuine, home-cooked Rogan josh sauce. It upsets me to think that I won't have it like this again, probably for a very long time.

But, we were in Mandu when I last wrote, about 5 days ago I think.

For the next few days after Omkareshwar, we had a car and a driver, which, compared to the day trains and local buses, is traveling in comfort. For lunch we stopped at a roadside stall, just out of Omkareshwar for some coffee and Paranthas. The great thing about the coffee is that they serve it in these really small cups, so you can go from one place to the next and sit and have a coffee without overdosing on caffine.

Mandu is on the top of a mountain range, and our drive took us through some remote countryside. The lonely planet guide said Mandu and its surrounds have a 'lost world' feel to them, and this is true. We rode past mud-rendered huts with thatched roofs and luminous green paddy fields where bullocks would pull a plough while husband and wife (with the wife in a sari of course)followed. We rode up the mountainside where apparently there is still a significant leopard population, but we did not see anything. From the top of the mountain you could back over all the checkered fields and think, as we had in Hampi, that little had changed here in hundreds of years.

Mandu is famous becuase the ruins of an entire Mughal city remain here. A Mughal king established a city on the top of this eminently defensible mountain around the 16th century, and it was, once, one of the largest and most prosperous cities in India, with nearly one million inhabitants. These ruins draw the (fairly small it has to be said) tourist crowd.

ON the way to the hotel we stopped at a Shiva temple with more lingums and bought fresh custard apples off the roadside. I had actually never had a custard apple (well not that I can remeber) and, remarkably, they do taste like custard.

We checked into our hotel, which had a garden and a nice view over the valley from the top of the mountain. It was late afternoon by the time we arrived. There is a good place to watch the sun set over the valley, and the skies were clear, so we took a rickshaw there. On the wall of an old Mughal watchtower, we sat and chatted while the sun set. There were a bunch of young boys and our leader tried to convince them we were hollywood stars. This scenario was only briefly interrupted by a rambling tourist from flanders, dressed in a skin-tight singlet and rainbow AFL shorts fulminating at the nearest Indian (which happened to be Mahindra in this case) that Indians were prejudice and racist. I think the irony escaped him.

After taking some 'fancy photos' as the flanders man described them, we returned to the hotel garden for dinner. Dinner was nice but it was genuinely cold. I did not think I would be cold in India. Apparently it was 7 degrees in Delhi yesterday. It was 40 when we left.

The next day we hired bicycles and rode our way around the ruins. There was a tomb, a huge mosque and mini-city called the royal enclave where the emperor and his 1500 wives lived. In the afternoon we rode 12km to visit two palaces on the mountaintop looking over the realm. The ruins are extraordinary, and very well preserved, but the real pleasure of Mandu is riding through the town, again, past all the villagers and their shacks, past the people working and the goats and buffalo and cows, imagining what a city 400 years ago would have been like. Apart from the main tourist sights that visited, all over the mountaintop a tomb, or a sentry tower, or a mosque pokes out from the overgrowth and farmland. Most farmers just cultivate around the ruins. In the afternoon, Kate bought some shawls from the local market. They turned out to be invaluable, even for me, as it was very cold again that night.

The next morning we left in the car for Bhopal, the capital of Madhya Pradesh and site of the Unione Carbide disaster in 1984. People are still waiting for compensation - its all over the papers to this day, 25 years later.

It was nearly evening when we arrived. On the road we stopped at the most filthy unhygienic restaurant we have yet experienced. You meal was complemented by a litter of emaciated puppies and a mother dog with an awful, weeping cyst. Remarkably, none of us got sick.

In Bhopal we visited the 3rd largest Mosque in the world, again built by the Mugals (the second biggest is in Delhi and the first in Mecca). Compared to the Delhi mosque, it was a relaxed place to walk around, with boys playing cricket in the courtyard. Bhopal is a lot like Delhi, with a congested, claustrophobic old city. It has the highest proportion of Muslim people in India, and there was a festival coming up where goats are sacrificed and eaten by family and friends. People were auctioning the animals in the old city and there were some very nervous, unsettled goats being dragged through the tuk-tuk traffic in the old city.

Incidentally, I read in the paper that 55,000 water buffalo were sacrificed in Nepal only a couple of days ago for a festival.

We visited Bhopal lake, which is still poisonous from the chemical spill. There here hundreds of locals strolling up and down the promenades set up along the banks. A local guy was playing a guitar and singing what sounded like bob marley songs. There was a green-lit mosque in the middle of the lake and ducks overfed on fairy floss and popcorn awkardly moved around the small pier.

I got into the festival spirit and had a mutton dish for dinner (mutton is goat here, not sheep) and afterward we walked across the road to catch the 9pm session of '2012' the latest apocalyptic movie with John cusak in it. I lost 10 rupess on a bet that it would be in English, but it didn't matter, dialog was not its strong suit.

Early the next morning we took a short, but packed, local bus to Sanchi. We were staying in a resort with quite nice, large rooms. Sanchi is home to Bhuddist 'stupas' - big domes with spires on top as old as 200BC. Some of the stupas have Bhuddas relics encased in them, bust you cannot see them (the relics). We visited these stupas not long after lunch and it was a pleasant walk through the parks. There was a good museum too, dedicated to the English archaeologists who stumbled upon the ruins (the oldest preserved structures in India I should add) and made it their work to restore them. Apart from the Stupa's, Sanchi is a one street town from w ild west movie. There are wooden shacks either side of a dusty street where people on either side sit and stare at one another when they are not collectively staring at a passer-by. There is one bank and a man with a shotgun stands guard out the front. I watched star cricket and slept for the rest of the afternoon.

The train to Jhansi was an hour late, so we had a quick look around the local temple, whose entrance is a giant lion's mouth. On the train, kate and I had a side berth, which was very comfortable. We were in sleeper class, so the carriages were attended by a regular stream of vendors and beggars. We played quite a bit of chess and stared out the window for the 4 hour journey. This was our last day train in India.

From Jhansi we had a tuk-tuk to Orchha, about 20 km away. Orchha is a beautiful city set among the ruins of a Hindu kingdom and on the banks of a wide and clear river.

But I am going for a last bike ride through rural India this afternoon, and will have to leave our last couple of days in Orchha for some other time soon.

Our love to you all.

Kate and Charles.