Jodhpur: How Bazaar....Matt May the Monkeyman

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Jodhpur surprisingly had another fort. Now not to be ungrateful but I think I can safely say we are all a bit forted out. It’s not quite ‘once you seen one you seen them all’ but they do get a weeeee bit repetitive. All the way back in downtown Delhi we were gagging for a fort but after about 6 they all start rolling in to one. And the history stuff is reeeaaalllly hard to follow…especially when it’s hot and you could be sunbathing….bad Jaz – must try to be a good tourist….

Anyway I did pay some attention and remember Mr Half-Indian-half-English generic audio guide voice say something about the handprints that can be seen along the walls by the main gate were from the Maharaja’s wives who would dip their hands in colouring and drag them along the walls as they left the fort for the last time to be burnt on a pyre with their hubbys who had died at war. They would sit absolutely silently with a prayer book in one hand and beads in the other on top of the burning wood as the fire engulfed them. Now THAT’S dedication. And I thought Bash was asking a lot when he asked for a 3 year minimum mourning period. I said I’d wear black pants for a while – does that not count?!

So that’s my fort fact of the day. There were also some stunning views out over the old city which has all it’s houses painted a sky blue and a big wall around it to protect it from invaders and wotnot. I like a good view so was having one of my ‘trying to find myself’ moments when Matt popped his head round the doorway and said “Oi mingeflaps, why you taking so long?”. And that was that. Moment over.

Other than a fort and a big wall the only other thing to see in Jodhpur is the bazaar. This was actually pretty cool. It’s all set round this main square with a clock tower (which lights up and changes colour at night despite the town not being able to feed its poor – money well spent) and is just a mass of people all shouting and bargaining and bustling about. They sell everything from delicious looking fruit & veg to shiny jingle jangle bangles stacked high in neat little piles to every colour of sari you can imagine. There were also some freaky plastic dolls like the ones you get in Cutprice at home for 99p. The only thing I can think that a child would want to do with one of these monstrosities is see how well they burn. Still each to their own.

We pottered about for a bit and bought some fruit and veg and were enjoying people-watching until we stepped through a crowd of people and were suddenly confronted with two bare-skinned beggar men with amputated limbs and lacerations rolling around on the floor in the middle of one of the paths. Everyone was chucking coins into their bowls and they were making these horrific moaning noises. It was pretty devastating to see and it’s the first time we’ve really seen poverty to this scale since landing.

Unfortunately it is a way of life here though, not that it makes it right, but you have to sort of accept it and move on if your going to get through travelling here – you’ve got to expect to see the good, the bad and the downright heartbreaking. All you can really try and do is allow it to make you appreciate what you’ve got back at home. Yeh the NHS has the waiting list equivalent to a night with the Dali llama, but at least we have a waiting list. The heartbreak of seeing street children begging and mutilated bodies on the floor is thankfully not an everyday occurrence as it is all too often out in India. And people will tell you to toughen up or it’s just harder to travel here but it’s not that easy to block it out. It’s the long car journeys or those minutes when you wake up in the middle of the night that thoughts of deformities and amputated limbs have a tendency to claw their way back to the forefront of your mind.

Still, that is a very negative side of the country and is hopefully something that will slowly change as India forces its way into the 21st Century. The country also has some amazing good points. One of which is food. No where else in the world can you pay 20 rupees (12 pence) for a freshly made dinner off of a street stall. It was here we discovered Bawbidi, which is basically a tomato based sauce loaded with herbs and veg and served with sweet bread rolls on a metal tray. We happened to stumble across a stall just as the owner was rustling up a new batch so watched with dribble-mouth as he chopped up tomatoes with a pair of scissors then added herbs and some other random saucey things and mashed it all together over a massive meter-wide flat frying pan with what looks suspiciously like a potato masher. He fries off some bread rolls and wholah – tomatoey, veggy, herby sauce of goodness is ready to serve. 20 rupees for one of the most awesome things that you can put in your mouth (insert pun as required).

Later that day Sanjay picked us up for a late afternoon stroll in the park. Dodd’s felt sick so wasn’t fussed on going and me and Matt were only debating it, but it turned out to be well worth the effort of talking to Sanjay for 20 minutes. I’d asked him what was at the park but he was in one of his petulant sulky child moods so didn’t really say much other than ‘just park’. So when we got there we laxidasicaly made our way to the gates just expecting to pick a spot to sunbathe for a wee while and piss off Sanjay by being late back to the car (yeh we’re really mature like that). So you can imagine our surprise when we walked through the main gate to be greeted by a shit tonne of monkeys. Now, when I said to Sanjay what are we going to see at the park he simply said ‘I don’t know, it is a park’. What must have slipped his mind were the couple of hundred dog-sized monkeys that were roaming every walkway, bench and wall in sight. Now I’m all for a good monkey, but when you’re expecting a serene walk in a park and all of a sudden there’s a tribe of monkeys in your face it comes as a bit of a shock. Especially when you haven’t brought any food to appease said monkey tribe so you have to run through them like a fucked up version of the gauntlet game on the original ‘Gladiators’ before they start jumping on your head.

I am of course exaggerating – they didn’t try and head-jump us and were actually pretty damn cute. They had little black hands and faces and there were lots of babies clinging to their mums and riding on their backs in between play fighting and other general day-to-day monkey business. The only scary ones were the BIG mother fuckers – the ones that could bound across the pathway in less that a few seconds and made rather loud and rather intimidating monkey-screams at one another. One of these bigger mo fo’s got into a bit of a scrap with one of the stray dogs that then started to chase it around the park and eventually up a tree. Now I’m no monkey v dog death-fight expert but this bad boy was literally the same size, if not slightly bigger than the dog and had an equally impressive set of pearly whites as well as opposable thumbs and sharpish looking monkey talons. My money would most definitely be on bad ass monkey over stupid yappy dog.

After getting through our first monkey gauntlet we walked round some old Jain temple ruins which were set in some pretty looking gardens with little fountains around them. This relaxed us enough to brave our second monkey show down. This time the path was over a bridge and was a bit narrower with more monkeys on each side, jumping along the walls and benches. In the middle of all the chaos was a cow – just chillin – enjoying all the monkey business. Amidst all the monkey chaos he was a very calming influence. I went to get a picture and just at that moment a monkey went into full jump-attack on another one sat on the wall behind the cow so I got an awesome shot of mid-air-monkey right above the calmest cow in the world.

Anyway, back to monkey gauntlet. Now considering we were a bit scared of the monkeys and didn’t want to do anything too much to attract their attention you would have thought that we would simply walk through the gauntlet rather calmly and quietly, wait until we were at a safe distance and then take some pictures and have a natter when they were far enough away not to rip our faces off. Matt interpreted this as: walk for a little bit, get halfway through, panic, let out a noise that sounded a lot like a monkey scream and then freeze on the spot. Now one thing you should know about moneys is when they hear other monkey squeals, they tend to respond. So when another big-ass dog-monkey is enjoying a game of chase along the wall and then suddenly hears a rather loud alien sounding monkey-squeal coming from some weird looking monkey in yellow flip flops and a straw hat, of course it’s going to stop dead in its tracks. It then very quickly spun its head around in a 360 degree exorcist twist and then snapped back its gums to reveal all hundred of its very sharp looking teeth whilst emitting some sort of fucked up hiss sound that didn’t seem to be saying ‘would you like to join us for tea’. Having had some experience with angry monkeys before (never look them in the eye) I told Matt to “look down and walk VERY quickly”. Funnily enough he did what he was told. We made it out alive and I immediately began pissing myself – his face was still fixed in that mid pants-soiling phase so he didn’t seem to find the funny side straight away but he has learnt a valuable lesson: when surrounded my a shit tonne of monkeys, don’t pretend to be one – they will figure it out.

After Matt regained a normal tightness to his rectum we wandered off and some weird little girl that kept smiling at us like a freaky devil child came up to us with her arms folded under her jacket as if she had something under there. I of course immediately decided it was a snake so we decided to leave the park for the day. When we got back to Sanjay I said “you didn’t tell us there were monkeys?!” and he said “of course – I come feed them yesterday with my friends”. Bless his little cotton underpants. Why wouldn’t his crazy little mind think to tell us that the park was overridden with monkey gauntlets. “Be careful with monkeys though – sometimes dangerous – you should take food”. Yes there it is – as usual with Sanjay you will always get the information but usually when it is no longer a) relevant or b) useful. Still when your driver has a whiskey addiction you can’t expect a quick response time – unless a cow is in the middle of the road – then you’re sorted.

Jasmina-Asiapants, over and out.

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