Advertisement
Published: February 3rd 2008
So after traveling India for 8 month I have finally made it to Rajasthan! Now I too will be able to talk to all those hip young people traveling India! Because until now my destinations within India mostly drew blank faces... Everybody seems to go to Rajasthan, this is one of the reasons I wasn't drawn to it! I feared the hassles that accompany such an amount of tourism... But it was time and I also thought it would be a nice thing for my parents to see (not the hassles of course, but the sights!) because there is a reason that everybody who is anybody goes to Rajasthan! I was hoping that it would be a little off season and this turned out to be a good assumption... It is too cold in Rajasthan for most travelers at the moment!
First stop Udaipur, which became famous in the James Bond movie 'Octopussy'... And if you are an Octopussy fanatic than this is the place to come, you can watch it in a different rooftop restaurant every evening at around sevenish... I was happily surprised about the few hassles we encountered and even happier with the room my parents selected!
Udaipur
Sunset over the Lake Palace as seen from our balcony
They got themselves a room on the lake with a balcony overhanging it! Yes traveling with parents is a great thing for a backpacker; I got to stay in many a good room, with hot showers and all that... I might have a mattress on the floor, but it was a good mattress and much better than the hard beds I normally sleep on!
We had a great sunset view over the Lake Pichola and it's Lake Palace! As we sipped our whiskey and had some roasted peanuts I got out my mothers binoculars to spy on the jet set that stay at the Lake Palace hotel... There is a palanquin bearer waiting for the distinguished guests that arrive by boat from the lake shore, to either dine or stay there... But I found it disappointing that he all he did was stand there, he didn't even escort them up the stairs! Possibly that was reserved for only those few who stay in the most expensive rooms! You pay only 200 dollars a night, you can forget about anybody escorting you off the boat, that is reserved for the 1200 dollars a night guests!
Udaipur's biggest palace is
Udaipur
My parents having a whiskey on their balcony situated on the lake shore and you can visit it for just 50 rupees if you don't pay the camera fee, which we didn't... But nobody checks it anyway, so I happily went about taking photos! I am sure the Maharaja of Udaipur will be able to pull through the lost revenue that I cost him! The palace was impressive with great views and sumptuous rooms, but very narrow corridors... The corridors were built this way for a reason, a palace it may be, but it was built to be able to defend it easily... Narrow corridors means only one soldier at a time can approach the defenders and can't wield his sword... An easy pick!
After having our fill of Udaipur’s palaces we decided it was still to hot for our liking and went up to Mt. Abu, the hill station of Rajasthan and a few degrees cooler still! Just missed the chance of being able to skate on the lake in the center of town as when we came the ice had melted... Of course it was only a thin layer from one night freezing, so I would have had to be very light indeed to have
Udaipur
View of the City Palace been able to skate on the lake... I have lost some weight here in India but not that much!
Mt. Abu is a pleasant but cold place in winter and we were happy with the extra blankets provided in our room and with the small bonfire that was lit every evening... The reason for visiting is to see the magnificent Jain Dilwara temples, which it took 1200 artisans and 1500 laborers 14 years to build! These were truly the most beautiful temples I have seen anywhere in the world, at least on the inside... The carvings were of incredible quality and detailing, with every square centimeter covered in friezes of different sorts... It is said the artisans were paid per amount of dust they collected! Now that is a good incentive to carve more intricately! It was free to enter, but no photography allowed unfortunately, so I bought some photos from the temple shop instead... When I get home I will scan them and put some on this site... After all that, we needed to give our brain some rest and headed back to the sunny rooftop of our hotel to sip some more of that fine Indian Whiskey!
Udaipur
And another view Next stop, Jodhpur, called the blue city because of the many blue houses inside the old town... Painted blue because of various reasons, the most interesting to me was that it seems to repel mosquitoes... Something I shall try to keep in mind if ever I get a house of my own! Jodhpur has a most impressive fort, which you can visit... The entrance fee includes an audio tour, which is suitably dramatically narrated by a very articulate Indian who tries his best to speak the Queens English! I was most impressed by the emotion he put into his explanations and stories, and of course the rooms and all that were quite wonderful too! After visiting the fort we also went to the mausoleums/memorials of the former Maharaja's! According to the Lonely Planet there was also a memorial to a peacock that is supposed to have flown (accidentally I presume) into the funeral pyre of the former Maharaja... We tried in vein to find it, so my mother asked a man at the entrance who told her it had been destroyed in some natural disaster about 10 years ago, but she could still see the pieces of it in
Udaipur
Jagdish Temple
a little shed by the entrance gate... Another wonderful job done by the authors of Lonely Planet! You would think after the memorial being gone for 10 years somebody might have noticed! That is about 3 or 4 updated Lonely Planet India books! Shows you how much research they do!
And than it was time for Jaisalmer! What to say about that city... The hassle factor is extreme here, with the touts appearing out of nowhere on the bus as you approach the outskirts of Jaisalmer! I never saw them come on the bus, for that matter the bus as far as I could see didn't stop until the last station and still somehow the touts appeared behind my seat on the bus, whispering promises of cheap rooms and great camel safaris! Where did they come from? Where they hiding under the seats? Or was it all a dessert mirage? Things only got worse when we tried to exit the bus, with the touts almost blocking the exit, all telling that they were the honest deal and the others were scumbags! At a certain moment I saw my father running over a busy intersection with his suitcase to get
Udaipur
Details on the Jagdish temple
away from the bus, with a tout hot on his heels! It was quite a sight! But my mother with her eagle eyes had spotted an elderly man standing a bit aloft from the going ons with a small card which had the name of the hotel we had decided to go to on it... So after clawing our way out of the bus and getting our luggage we told him we wanted to stay at his place and he had a jeep to bring us there! To be sure I made it very clear we were not interested in a camel safari! And he said that was fine, nobody would bother us for anything and he was true to his promise! And after berating the Lonely Planet I shall now give it to them that it was via their book that we found this hotel... So it's not all bad!
I still haven't said anything about Jaisalmer... I found it had a bit of a Disneylike quality to it... It all seemed rather fake, with the circus acts in front of the fort, the men dressed up in their finest selling you all kinds of stuff, every meter
Udaipur
City Palace
there would be someone trying to lure you into their shop... They might as well have been mechanical machines, their lines never changed... I remember when I was young I went on this boat ride in the biggest fun park of my country, it was going to take you through this Arabian fantasy world... You know with mechanical dolls looking like what we think Arab traders would look like, calling to you to buy there wears, tigers and what not and fantastical castles... Now that is what Jaisalmer reminded me of! That is not to say it isn't beautiful, but it just seemed unreal... The architecture is truly splendid and it really does look like something out of 1001 nights! You expect Aladdin to jump out of a closet any moment! And maybe if you are lucky you will find a magical oil lamp along the main street amongst the other compulsory paraphernalia...
We visited the fort and the palace within the fort where another audio tour was provided, but this time narrated by a seductive female voice... I am not sure which I preferred, the bombastic dramatism of the audio tour in Jodhpur or the subtle femininity of
Udaipur
Entrance to the palace proper
the one in Jaisalmer...
Apart from all that we also managed to have dinner at a place with an anti-Semitic Jaisalmerie owner who claimed to be Tibetan and subsequently overcharged us for food that could best be described as bones without the chicken and momo's without the momo!
The last stop on at least my tour of Rajasthan was Bikaner, which I found one of the more pleasant towns in the state... It receives a lot less tourists than it's counterparts around the state and this could be why I found it so pleasant... Few tourists means few hassles! We went to see the Rat Temple outside Bikaner, the raison d'etre for visiting Bikaner... I paid my respect to Master Splinter (for those of you who don't know who Master Splinter is: he is the wise old rat that the Teenage Mutant Ninja Hero Turtles always come to for advice... Ha, my nine years at university were not totally wasted after all!) and his compatriots and managed to even see a white rat! Supposedly very good luck! In the afternoon my mother and I went to see the fort at Bikaner, this time with a real guide! His
Udaipur
Delft blue tiles in one of the inner courtyards of the palace
audio counterparts were better I must say! Than in the evening it was time for me to say goodbye to my parents as I was taking the night bus to Delhi to catch my flight to London... It is time to help the medical world again by supplying my humble body for testing! There will be no regular updates for a while until I get back to India again in two month or so! Or maybe there will be, but not more than one or two, life in the clinic is just not as exciting as in India... At least not in the same way...
Advertisement
Tot: 0.062s; Tpl: 0.014s; cc: 12; qc: 29; dbt: 0.0309s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.1mb
Ornella
non-member comment
Trains!!
I loved Jaisalmer but then I went 16 years ago and arrived by train (not a touristy choice as the train just has wooden seating and the floor has a ton of sand from it all being blown in from the desert! But as a teenager I thought it was great, apart from the sand in your sandwich, lol!) Consequently very few touts, who concentrate on the bus stations, if I remember rightly. I think we wondered around till we found a suitably small place to stay where we ended up going for 5 days in the desert with a man whose main occupation was of smuggler, drugs into India, alcohol into Pakistan, can't quite remember the exact details! But made for fabulous campfire stories and it was only him and my friend and I! Maybe we were just lucky with our experiences. Or 16 years makes a difference. I remember, weavers and people sewing those classic Rajhastani mats but no entertainers! And not many tourists! (I think it was end of Feb or start of March, not sure!) Another place I really liked was Gwalior. Actually loads of other places. We leave on Thursday, can't wait! Take care!