Frustations in India Part 2 (17th November - 6th December 2006)
Right, so we’d arrived in Jaipur, Rajasthan’s capital and the most polluted city in the state. Luckily we’d arranged accommodation in advance and they arranged for a rickshaw to pick us up – our driver was a man called Salim. We didn’t get off to a good start with Salim as there was a bit of confusion over whether or not he was supposed to be our driver. Then when we got in the rickshaw he gave us the hard sell on what a great tour guide he was. We ended up using him in the end as we needed a driver for our stay in Jaipur as a lot of the sights are very spread out and at least with Salim he spoke good English and a lot of people had said that he was a good guide. The only driving that he did for us today though was to drive us to the hotel and then into town because we were going to the movies.
India has a huge movie industry, Bollywood, so one of the things that we wanted to do while we were here was to see a traditional Indian film in a traditional Indian cinema. And we’d been told that one of the best of these was here in Jaipur, the Raj Mandir Cinema, an opulent cinema that looks a bit like a large cream cake with a spectacular foyer. So we cued up here, well, Kamay cued, and I went to get takeaway pizza as by the time that we got there the line was already really long. They do this great thing though where the men and ladies cue up separately and if anyone tries to push in there’s a lady with a stick that hits then potential pushers in – it’s great!! While we were waiting for the fim to start we met the first really nice people in India – a brother and sister from Delhi who were in Jaipur for their parents wedding anniversary. The film was really good – lots of singing and dancing, but no subtitles so we had to ask some questions afterwards to find out a bit more about the film and why certain things had happened. It still didn’t make that much sense but it was still good.
The next morning we had breakfast at the hotels roof top restaurant, with great views of the walled city that encircles the Old City that we would be touring for the rest of the day with Salim. The Old city is also known as the Pink City, because back in 1876 the entire city was painted pink as this is the colour associated with hospitality, to welcome the then Prince of Wales. And this has carried on, with nearly every building within the city’s walls still being pink. First stop was Hawa Mahal (Palace of the Winds), the most distinctive of Jaipur’s sights, it’s a five storey building made out of pink sandstone in 1799. It was built so that the ladies of the royal household could watch life in the city without being seen themselves. So there’s lots of small windows and is great for people watching. There is also a small art gallery. Then it was the spectacular City Palace, a sprawling complex of courtyards and buildings. As well as some great architecture there are lots of museum areas containing, traditional clothing, weapons, manuscripts and what are supposed to be the largest silver objects in the world (1.6m tall silver vessels that Maharaja Madho Singh II used to take the holy Ganges water to England). Just over the road from the palace is Jantar Mantar, an observatory that they started building in 1728. It’s like a large park filled with mammoth bizarre sculptures that were used by Jai Singh for various purposes including the calculation of eclipses. Most spectacular is probably the 27m high sundial that you can climb up. Truly bizarre. In the afternoon we headed out of town to the Amber Fort, which is in Amber, the old capital of Jaipur state. The fort was really spectacular with temples where goats used to be sacrificed daily, the Maharaja’s apartments, the labyrinth of corridors that made up the women’s quarters and some amazing views from the forts ramparts. We also experienced a lot of hostility here, but I said that I wouldn’t dwell on this too much.
Saturday morning saw us on a train to Ajmer where we’d be transferring to a car to take us to Pushkar, which was our next destination. This train was ace, because it was only a short journey there were no sleeper carriages so instead it was a more traditional seating system with air conditioned and tea and biscuits!! Weird how English this place can be. Pushkar is a small quiet town that is just on the edge of the desert. Despite it’s size it contains about 400 temples which all sit around a holy lake which is said to have appeared when Brahma dropped a lotus flower. It’s also right up there at the top of the list for Hindu pilgrims to visit because it contains one of the few Brahma temples. More exciting for us though was that it hosts the annual camel fair – where about 200,000 people and 50,000 camels attend. Sadly we were a bit late for this, but we knew that it would still be a really good place to relax for a few days. And this is exactly what we did. We stayed in one of the nicest hotels yet, Seventh Heaven, an old haveli (a special kind of ornate house found in Rajasthan) with beautifully decorated rooms, a good roof top restaurant with tasty food, friendly service and absolutely no concept of speed. Some times it took them over an hour to make a sandwich. We weren’t in a hurry though, we spent most of time up on the roof or in other cafes around town reading and relaxing. It really is a tiny town so you can walk around the whole place in less than half an hour, so we did this a few times checked out the Brahma temple, the lake, caught a couple of sunsets, but really didn’t do much for three days.
Sadly we were booked onto a train from Ajmer that would take us to Jodhpur, on Wednesday 22nd, so we reluctantly took the bus for the half hour ride back to Ajmer. All of a sudden we were back to the real world, stuck in a cramped bus with no room left even to stand hurtling around blind corners on a dusty road. We seriously discussed canceling the rest of the trip and just staying in Pushkar until it was time to fly back to Singapore. It was late by the time that we got to Jodhpur so we weren’t very happy to find out that our room that we’d booked wasn’t available and that we’d have to spend our first night in a tiny noisy room with lots of holes for creepy crawlies to get into. Jodhpur is the home of those funny horse riding trousers and some truly spectacular facial hair. The best moustaches I have ever seen are in Jodhpur, some real old English army full bodied, styled taches! There’s also a lot of blue houses (this used to signify a house as the home of a Brahmin), people and traffic – so another hectic dirty city. The main attraction, apart from face fluff, is Meherangarh (Majestic Fort), and it lives up to it’s name. It sits on top of a 125m hill and overlooks the hectic new city below it – from a distance you can really appreciate the contrast of the two. We were staying just beneath the walls of the Fort so this was our first stop on Thursday morning. Included in the entrance price for foreigners is one of those audio tours that are normally at best very dry but in fact this one was excellent, with a mix of history, information and anecdotes. The fort is still ran by the current Maharaja of Jodhpur and from what we heard on the audio tour and the whole experience at the fort and around town later on, he seems like he know what he’s doing as far as the tourists go. The staff at the fort were friendly, nobody was hunting for sneaky backsheesh or trying to get you into their friends silk shop. Not only was the audio tour good, the actual fort was spectacular, with lots of interesting things on show. They even have a café that serves good coffee and a restaurant that opens in the evening and offers great views out over the city. We were back here on Friday night for the view and the sadly average food. It was worth it just for the view though. By the end of Thursday I wasn’t feeling well and couldn’t even eat dinner!!! So Friday morning was a wash out with me just sleeping for most of it, but in the afternoon we took a walk around the new city and strolled through the market taking in all of the dazzling colours on display at the stalls and on peoples backs and heads (this area is also renowned for colourful turbans).
Saturday morning was another early start, another train ride and another city with famous forts. This time it was Jaisalmer, one of the differences here was that instead of being situated on the edge of the desert, Jaisalmer is right in the middle of it. So the view from the carriage on the way here was just of barren land, dotted with the occasional small village and then all of a sudden you get to this giant sandcastle with a spectacular fort on the top of it. As I’ve probably said already, there is a lot of money to be made from commissions, so people are always keen to take you to a hotel, restaurant or tour guide. But outside of the train station in Jaisalmer it was the craziest tout scrum that we’d ever seen. There were about 30 touts all with placards with different hotel names on but there appeared to be an invisible line that they weren’t allowed to cross because as soon as they got a bit too close to us a policeman chased them off and even picked up one of their discarded placards and took a couple of swipes at them. As well as the fort and palaces, Jaisalmer offers trips into the desert, usually involving some time on the back of a camel. These can last for up to 5 days, but we'd already decided that 5 days in a desert with smelly camels was a bit too long for us so we were just going to book a sunset trip. The hotel that we stayed at, the Shahi Palace organised trips and we'd heard some good things about them, so we just took the easy option and booked with them for Monday night. In the meantime there was lots to see around town. In the afternoon of day one we just took a relaxing walk around the forted area of the town. Within the walls was an amazing maze of little alleys and tiny streets, so that it was really hard to keep your bearings or have any idea where anything was. Lots of old buildings that were now obviously turned into gift shops and the like, stranger though were the bhang shops. Bhang is basically marijuana and these shops can cook it up into cookies, cakes, sweets or serve it as a lassi. Like in S.E. Asia it's been on the menu's in some of the more traveller friendly restaurants but this was the first time that we'd actually seen shops selling nothing but bhang!! Found ourselves a rooftop cafe and camped out ready for the sun setting in the distant desert - a great way to finish our first day in Jaisalmer. Sunday was spent around the fort again and in particular checking out the spectacular interconnecting complex of seven Jain temples and their detailed carvings and the palace which is under restoration, but was still looking impressive. The evening was spent at a traditional restaurant complete with traditional music and some traditional dishes on the menu. When you’re stuck in the desert, hundreds of miles from anywhere that could possibly grow decent vegetables or where the musical influences have been almost as limited as the rain, I think that you should read traditional as crap. The music was terrible, although I’m sure that it’s a sound that you grow accustomed to, or have to be born into, but the food…. I made the mistake of ordering one of the traditional dishes, Kamay stuck with something that she knew and it was good, I know because I had to share most of it with her as my dish was basically brambles in a sauce, oh just thinking about it now makes me shiver.
We had our camel safari planned for Monday evening, so we spent most of the day relaxing, walking around the town again and sorting out some admin, like trying to decide what to do with the last week in India as we’d changed our plans a couple of times. This meant heading to the train station and standing a que of 7 people for an hour with the guy behind us taking a little bit too much interest in where we were going, what we were saying etc. Again, just another example of people not having any concept of privacy or personal space, but that’s all part of being in India. The safari was going to be the two of us, a guy on his own and two ladies, the ladies were staying overnight in the desert though, so we were picked up from the hotel and driven out into the desert. First stop were some more Jain temples and a chance to buy some refreshments, oh and a chance to get hussled in a board game version of pool by the owner of the refreshment stall. Luckily the stakes were only a beer and I didn’t lose so we didn't lose any money and the our pool shark owner was a good winner. Then it was back in the jeep to go further into the desert until we got to a small village where we met our camel guides and had a cup of tea – ahhh, followed by meeting our hump-backed friends. It was a bit hairy getting up on the back of the camel, they sit down on the ground, you sit on their backs (luckily this is padded so it wasn’t too painful) and then the camel stands up, but as it does this it pitches forward so that you have to hold on for dear life just hoping that you don’t slide off the front. We were only out for an hour or so on the camels, but it was enough to get a feel for it and to get a feel for the desert and the scenery. At the designated place we stopped the camels and got ready for the sunset, and it was a doozy!! Then it was back in the jeep for a hair raising journey back to town. It was a really good trip with the only bad point being the kids that led our camels who weren’t satisfied with the tip that we gave them because the other guy had tipped his boy more. Ah well, we’d already adjusted to the fact that nobody will ever be happy with any tip that you give here.
Tuesday saw us back on the road with our first long distant bus ride as we headed back to Jodhpur and then on by train to Abu Road where we'd get a taxi to Mount Au. We were lucky to even get to the bus as our taxi driver had no idea where the bus station was!! Then the bus was another interesting experience. It was a bit taller than a regular coach, and had two levels to it, so you either sat on the bottom level in regular seats or you were on the second level on a bench like “sleeper” seat. Lots of overly inquisitive passengers and some very creepy guys. We were happy to get back to Jodhpur where we had a couple of hours to kill before the train to Abu Road. From here it was a half hour drive to our final destination of Mount Abu. By the time we arrived it was late so we just checked into the hotel and ordered room service.
Mount Abu was completely different to everywhere else that we’d been to in India so far, in terms of the climate, the scenery, the food and the people. It’s a hill station that sits about 1,200m high so it’s a lot cooler than the other cities and the scenery is more alpine than the deserts and big cities that we’ve been used to. It felt as if we hadn’t seen greenery for months before we got here. Mount Abu is a very popular holiday destination for Indian tourists, especially those from Gujarat so there is a lot of Gujarati food on offer. Best of all was that all of a sudden we weren’t the big attraction that we were everywhere else, the locals weren’t concerned with selling us things at over inflated prices, if anything they probably hassled the Indian tourists more than us because there were more of them than us. Also it was a good chance to meet Indian people that weren’t connected to the overseas tourist industry and they were really nice, whether it was tourists in the streets or the staff in the restaurants. It was a shame that we only had one full day here, but we got to see everything that we wanted to. The actual town is like any other tourist town with shops selling stuff that nobody really wants, but as we walked outside of town we got to see some beautiful scenery from the various viewpoints and the Dilwara Temples. These date from 1031 and are supposed to be some of the best architecture in India and they are stunning, lots of intricate carvings (the artists were supposed to have been paid according to the amount of dust they collected, encouraging them to carve more intricately). There was also a sunset viewpoint and as I’m a sucker for a sunset in the evening we took a walk here. You had to climb a bit of a hill, but nothing too bad, definitely not a big enough hill to warrant people taking a cart up – basically you sit in the cart and depending on your weight either one or two people would push this cart up the hill. Then on the way down either one or two people tried to slow the cart down on it’s descent, this again depended on how heavy you were. Dinner was a magnificent Gujarati thali.
Thursday, we had to leave, so were on a bus to our next destination, Udaipur. The bus ride was great because we met Mr. and Mrs. Gupta, an Indian couple that now live in Canada and were here visiting family. She taught Hindi in Canada and he was a retired quantum physicist that had published various papers on things that I had no way of ever understanding but despite this we talked for most of the journey to Udaipur and I think that he really enjoyed telling all of his great stories, which judging by his wife’s reactions, she’d heard many times before.
They say that Udaipur is Rajasthan’s most romantic city, although we didn’t quite feel this. It was a nice city though, again lots of narrow twisty streets to get lost in and some more spectacular buildings. The thing that the hoteliers and restaurant owners in the area are most proud of though seems to be that part of Octopussy was filmed here. Nearly every restaurant and hotel has a screening of the film at least once a week, often every night!! It was filmed in 1983!! I was 7 when it was released, get over it!! While we were here we took in the city palace and the museum, walked around the town a lot, especially around the lake and took a cookery class. This was one of the few places that we’d seen anyone offering these and I would have thought that loads of tourists would want to learn how to cook this great food. Our teacher was nice although the kitchen was basically his front room, and the food was really good and it was all really well organized. As well as cooking a couple of curries we made some breads, teas and vegetable cutlets, so hopefully we can make it taste this good when we come home. One evening we also went to the Bagore-Ki-Haveli, which by day is a museum that is split between showing how the rooms would have looked when it was built and lived in by a former prime minister and cultural displays and an art gallery. But in the evening they put on traditional Rajasthani dances. We were expecting this to be a bit naff, but this was amazing, there was lots of twirling dancers with up to about 8 pots on their heads, dancers hitting bells like an Indian Morris dancer, it was ace.
Just outside of town are some interesting cenotaphs that we visited on our second day and then on day three we took a cab out to Kumbalgarh, a huge fort about 80kms from Udaipur, right out in the middle of nowhere. It’s been built on top of this hill and you get the most amazing views from it’s walls. Within the forts walls there are over 360 temples, although we only had a look at a few of them.
The next day we just relaxed around town waiting for our train to Delhi, our last train ride in India, it was an overnight train so we arrived in the early hours, checked into our hotel and slept. This time we decided to avoid the cheaper budget tourist areas and treated ourselves to some nice food and just tried to get through the day without being hassled by anyone.
We flew out in the early hours of Wednesday morning. We’d seen a lot of great things, but we were so happy to be leaving, I even celebrated with a couple of beers on the plane (although I think that the second was pushing it a bit because I started to feel a bit tippsy).
India has a huge movie industry, Bollywood, so one of the things that we wanted to do while we were here was to see a traditional Indian film in a traditional Indian cinema. And we’d been told that one of the best of these was here in Jaipur, the Raj Mandir Cinema, an opulent cinema that looks a bit like a large cream cake with a spectacular foyer. So we cued up here, well, Kamay cued, and I went to get takeaway pizza as by the time that we got there the line was already really long. They do this great thing though where the men and ladies cue up separately and if anyone tries to push in there’s a lady with a stick that hits then potential pushers in – it’s great!! While we were waiting for the fim to start we met the first really nice people in India – a brother and sister from Delhi who were in Jaipur for their parents wedding anniversary. The film was really good – lots of singing and dancing, but no subtitles so we had to ask some questions afterwards to find out a bit more about the film and why certain things had happened. It still didn’t make that much sense but it was still good.
The next morning we had breakfast at the hotels roof top restaurant, with great views of the walled city that encircles the Old City that we would be touring for the rest of the day with Salim. The Old city is also known as the Pink City, because back in 1876 the entire city was painted pink as this is the colour associated with hospitality, to welcome the then Prince of Wales. And this has carried on, with nearly every building within the city’s walls still being pink. First stop was Hawa Mahal (Palace of the Winds), the most distinctive of Jaipur’s sights, it’s a five storey building made out of pink sandstone in 1799. It was built so that the ladies of the royal household could watch life in the city without being seen themselves. So there’s lots of small windows and is great for people watching. There is also a small art gallery. Then it was the spectacular City Palace, a sprawling complex of courtyards and buildings. As well as some great architecture there are lots of museum areas containing, traditional clothing, weapons, manuscripts and what are supposed to be the largest silver objects in the world (1.6m tall silver vessels that Maharaja Madho Singh II used to take the holy Ganges water to England). Just over the road from the palace is Jantar Mantar, an observatory that they started building in 1728. It’s like a large park filled with mammoth bizarre sculptures that were used by Jai Singh for various purposes including the calculation of eclipses. Most spectacular is probably the 27m high sundial that you can climb up. Truly bizarre. In the afternoon we headed out of town to the Amber Fort, which is in Amber, the old capital of Jaipur state. The fort was really spectacular with temples where goats used to be sacrificed daily, the Maharaja’s apartments, the labyrinth of corridors that made up the women’s quarters and some amazing views from the forts ramparts. We also experienced a lot of hostility here, but I said that I wouldn’t dwell on this too much.
Saturday morning saw us on a train to Ajmer where we’d be transferring to a car to take us to Pushkar, which was our next destination. This train was ace, because it was only a short journey there were no sleeper carriages so instead it was a more traditional seating system with air conditioned and tea and biscuits!! Weird how English this place can be. Pushkar is a small quiet town that is just on the edge of the desert. Despite it’s size it contains about 400 temples which all sit around a holy lake which is said to have appeared when Brahma dropped a lotus flower. It’s also right up there at the top of the list for Hindu pilgrims to visit because it contains one of the few Brahma temples. More exciting for us though was that it hosts the annual camel fair – where about 200,000 people and 50,000 camels attend. Sadly we were a bit late for this, but we knew that it would still be a really good place to relax for a few days. And this is exactly what we did. We stayed in one of the nicest hotels yet, Seventh Heaven, an old haveli (a special kind of ornate house found in Rajasthan) with beautifully decorated rooms, a good roof top restaurant with tasty food, friendly service and absolutely no concept of speed. Some times it took them over an hour to make a sandwich. We weren’t in a hurry though, we spent most of time up on the roof or in other cafes around town reading and relaxing. It really is a tiny town so you can walk around the whole place in less than half an hour, so we did this a few times checked out the Brahma temple, the lake, caught a couple of sunsets, but really didn’t do much for three days.
Sadly we were booked onto a train from Ajmer that would take us to Jodhpur, on Wednesday 22nd, so we reluctantly took the bus for the half hour ride back to Ajmer. All of a sudden we were back to the real world, stuck in a cramped bus with no room left even to stand hurtling around blind corners on a dusty road. We seriously discussed canceling the rest of the trip and just staying in Pushkar until it was time to fly back to Singapore. It was late by the time that we got to Jodhpur so we weren’t very happy to find out that our room that we’d booked wasn’t available and that we’d have to spend our first night in a tiny noisy room with lots of holes for creepy crawlies to get into. Jodhpur is the home of those funny horse riding trousers and some truly spectacular facial hair. The best moustaches I have ever seen are in Jodhpur, some real old English army full bodied, styled taches! There’s also a lot of blue houses (this used to signify a house as the home of a Brahmin), people and traffic – so another hectic dirty city. The main attraction, apart from face fluff, is Meherangarh (Majestic Fort), and it lives up to it’s name. It sits on top of a 125m hill and overlooks the hectic new city below it – from a distance you can really appreciate the contrast of the two. We were staying just beneath the walls of the Fort so this was our first stop on Thursday morning. Included in the entrance price for foreigners is one of those audio tours that are normally at best very dry but in fact this one was excellent, with a mix of history, information and anecdotes. The fort is still ran by the current Maharaja of Jodhpur and from what we heard on the audio tour and the whole experience at the fort and around town later on, he seems like he know what he’s doing as far as the tourists go. The staff at the fort were friendly, nobody was hunting for sneaky backsheesh or trying to get you into their friends silk shop. Not only was the audio tour good, the actual fort was spectacular, with lots of interesting things on show. They even have a café that serves good coffee and a restaurant that opens in the evening and offers great views out over the city. We were back here on Friday night for the view and the sadly average food. It was worth it just for the view though. By the end of Thursday I wasn’t feeling well and couldn’t even eat dinner!!! So Friday morning was a wash out with me just sleeping for most of it, but in the afternoon we took a walk around the new city and strolled through the market taking in all of the dazzling colours on display at the stalls and on peoples backs and heads (this area is also renowned for colourful turbans).
Saturday morning was another early start, another train ride and another city with famous forts. This time it was Jaisalmer, one of the differences here was that instead of being situated on the edge of the desert, Jaisalmer is right in the middle of it. So the view from the carriage on the way here was just of barren land, dotted with the occasional small village and then all of a sudden you get to this giant sandcastle with a spectacular fort on the top of it. As I’ve probably said already, there is a lot of money to be made from commissions, so people are always keen to take you to a hotel, restaurant or tour guide. But outside of the train station in Jaisalmer it was the craziest tout scrum that we’d ever seen. There were about 30 touts all with placards with different hotel names on but there appeared to be an invisible line that they weren’t allowed to cross because as soon as they got a bit too close to us a policeman chased them off and even picked up one of their discarded placards and took a couple of swipes at them. As well as the fort and palaces, Jaisalmer offers trips into the desert, usually involving some time on the back of a camel. These can last for up to 5 days, but we'd already decided that 5 days in a desert with smelly camels was a bit too long for us so we were just going to book a sunset trip. The hotel that we stayed at, the Shahi Palace organised trips and we'd heard some good things about them, so we just took the easy option and booked with them for Monday night. In the meantime there was lots to see around town. In the afternoon of day one we just took a relaxing walk around the forted area of the town. Within the walls was an amazing maze of little alleys and tiny streets, so that it was really hard to keep your bearings or have any idea where anything was. Lots of old buildings that were now obviously turned into gift shops and the like, stranger though were the bhang shops. Bhang is basically marijuana and these shops can cook it up into cookies, cakes, sweets or serve it as a lassi. Like in S.E. Asia it's been on the menu's in some of the more traveller friendly restaurants but this was the first time that we'd actually seen shops selling nothing but bhang!! Found ourselves a rooftop cafe and camped out ready for the sun setting in the distant desert - a great way to finish our first day in Jaisalmer. Sunday was spent around the fort again and in particular checking out the spectacular interconnecting complex of seven Jain temples and their detailed carvings and the palace which is under restoration, but was still looking impressive. The evening was spent at a traditional restaurant complete with traditional music and some traditional dishes on the menu. When you’re stuck in the desert, hundreds of miles from anywhere that could possibly grow decent vegetables or where the musical influences have been almost as limited as the rain, I think that you should read traditional as crap. The music was terrible, although I’m sure that it’s a sound that you grow accustomed to, or have to be born into, but the food…. I made the mistake of ordering one of the traditional dishes, Kamay stuck with something that she knew and it was good, I know because I had to share most of it with her as my dish was basically brambles in a sauce, oh just thinking about it now makes me shiver.
We had our camel safari planned for Monday evening, so we spent most of the day relaxing, walking around the town again and sorting out some admin, like trying to decide what to do with the last week in India as we’d changed our plans a couple of times. This meant heading to the train station and standing a que of 7 people for an hour with the guy behind us taking a little bit too much interest in where we were going, what we were saying etc. Again, just another example of people not having any concept of privacy or personal space, but that’s all part of being in India. The safari was going to be the two of us, a guy on his own and two ladies, the ladies were staying overnight in the desert though, so we were picked up from the hotel and driven out into the desert. First stop were some more Jain temples and a chance to buy some refreshments, oh and a chance to get hussled in a board game version of pool by the owner of the refreshment stall. Luckily the stakes were only a beer and I didn’t lose so we didn't lose any money and the our pool shark owner was a good winner. Then it was back in the jeep to go further into the desert until we got to a small village where we met our camel guides and had a cup of tea – ahhh, followed by meeting our hump-backed friends. It was a bit hairy getting up on the back of the camel, they sit down on the ground, you sit on their backs (luckily this is padded so it wasn’t too painful) and then the camel stands up, but as it does this it pitches forward so that you have to hold on for dear life just hoping that you don’t slide off the front. We were only out for an hour or so on the camels, but it was enough to get a feel for it and to get a feel for the desert and the scenery. At the designated place we stopped the camels and got ready for the sunset, and it was a doozy!! Then it was back in the jeep for a hair raising journey back to town. It was a really good trip with the only bad point being the kids that led our camels who weren’t satisfied with the tip that we gave them because the other guy had tipped his boy more. Ah well, we’d already adjusted to the fact that nobody will ever be happy with any tip that you give here.
Tuesday saw us back on the road with our first long distant bus ride as we headed back to Jodhpur and then on by train to Abu Road where we'd get a taxi to Mount Au. We were lucky to even get to the bus as our taxi driver had no idea where the bus station was!! Then the bus was another interesting experience. It was a bit taller than a regular coach, and had two levels to it, so you either sat on the bottom level in regular seats or you were on the second level on a bench like “sleeper” seat. Lots of overly inquisitive passengers and some very creepy guys. We were happy to get back to Jodhpur where we had a couple of hours to kill before the train to Abu Road. From here it was a half hour drive to our final destination of Mount Abu. By the time we arrived it was late so we just checked into the hotel and ordered room service.
Mount Abu was completely different to everywhere else that we’d been to in India so far, in terms of the climate, the scenery, the food and the people. It’s a hill station that sits about 1,200m high so it’s a lot cooler than the other cities and the scenery is more alpine than the deserts and big cities that we’ve been used to. It felt as if we hadn’t seen greenery for months before we got here. Mount Abu is a very popular holiday destination for Indian tourists, especially those from Gujarat so there is a lot of Gujarati food on offer. Best of all was that all of a sudden we weren’t the big attraction that we were everywhere else, the locals weren’t concerned with selling us things at over inflated prices, if anything they probably hassled the Indian tourists more than us because there were more of them than us. Also it was a good chance to meet Indian people that weren’t connected to the overseas tourist industry and they were really nice, whether it was tourists in the streets or the staff in the restaurants. It was a shame that we only had one full day here, but we got to see everything that we wanted to. The actual town is like any other tourist town with shops selling stuff that nobody really wants, but as we walked outside of town we got to see some beautiful scenery from the various viewpoints and the Dilwara Temples. These date from 1031 and are supposed to be some of the best architecture in India and they are stunning, lots of intricate carvings (the artists were supposed to have been paid according to the amount of dust they collected, encouraging them to carve more intricately). There was also a sunset viewpoint and as I’m a sucker for a sunset in the evening we took a walk here. You had to climb a bit of a hill, but nothing too bad, definitely not a big enough hill to warrant people taking a cart up – basically you sit in the cart and depending on your weight either one or two people would push this cart up the hill. Then on the way down either one or two people tried to slow the cart down on it’s descent, this again depended on how heavy you were. Dinner was a magnificent Gujarati thali.
Thursday, we had to leave, so were on a bus to our next destination, Udaipur. The bus ride was great because we met Mr. and Mrs. Gupta, an Indian couple that now live in Canada and were here visiting family. She taught Hindi in Canada and he was a retired quantum physicist that had published various papers on things that I had no way of ever understanding but despite this we talked for most of the journey to Udaipur and I think that he really enjoyed telling all of his great stories, which judging by his wife’s reactions, she’d heard many times before.
They say that Udaipur is Rajasthan’s most romantic city, although we didn’t quite feel this. It was a nice city though, again lots of narrow twisty streets to get lost in and some more spectacular buildings. The thing that the hoteliers and restaurant owners in the area are most proud of though seems to be that part of Octopussy was filmed here. Nearly every restaurant and hotel has a screening of the film at least once a week, often every night!! It was filmed in 1983!! I was 7 when it was released, get over it!! While we were here we took in the city palace and the museum, walked around the town a lot, especially around the lake and took a cookery class. This was one of the few places that we’d seen anyone offering these and I would have thought that loads of tourists would want to learn how to cook this great food. Our teacher was nice although the kitchen was basically his front room, and the food was really good and it was all really well organized. As well as cooking a couple of curries we made some breads, teas and vegetable cutlets, so hopefully we can make it taste this good when we come home. One evening we also went to the Bagore-Ki-Haveli, which by day is a museum that is split between showing how the rooms would have looked when it was built and lived in by a former prime minister and cultural displays and an art gallery. But in the evening they put on traditional Rajasthani dances. We were expecting this to be a bit naff, but this was amazing, there was lots of twirling dancers with up to about 8 pots on their heads, dancers hitting bells like an Indian Morris dancer, it was ace.
Just outside of town are some interesting cenotaphs that we visited on our second day and then on day three we took a cab out to Kumbalgarh, a huge fort about 80kms from Udaipur, right out in the middle of nowhere. It’s been built on top of this hill and you get the most amazing views from it’s walls. Within the forts walls there are over 360 temples, although we only had a look at a few of them.
The next day we just relaxed around town waiting for our train to Delhi, our last train ride in India, it was an overnight train so we arrived in the early hours, checked into our hotel and slept. This time we decided to avoid the cheaper budget tourist areas and treated ourselves to some nice food and just tried to get through the day without being hassled by anyone.
We flew out in the early hours of Wednesday morning. We’d seen a lot of great things, but we were so happy to be leaving, I even celebrated with a couple of beers on the plane (although I think that the second was pushing it a bit because I started to feel a bit tippsy).
posted by Shippo at 8:58 AM
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