Hassles and Castles

For some reason, I thought it would be a good idea to jump in head first, by visiting India’s ‘Golden Triangle’ of Delhi, Agra and Jaipur first. I arrived in Delhi just after midnight, to find an earily deserted Paharganj, where a bomb had exploded in the main bazaar just a few days before my arrival. I was ready for a showdown. There’s so much hype associated with arriving in Delhi that it was bound to be a let down. One guy in Pakistan had been advising me to buy a cane to bring to India. Disappointingly though, it was a couple of days before anybody tried to scam me. But by then, I was already sick of Delhi.

Here’s the thing - you walk out of your hotel in the morning, and the first sight that greets you is a rickshaw driver touting for business. It’s early, the sun is shining, and his calls bounce right off you - you’re firm, in control, and nobody is gonna mess you around. By the afternoon, the constant attention starts to irritate, and every call and whistle is adding up. And by the evening time, you’re through with playful replies, polite smiles, and the ‘pretend they’re not there’ game. And finally, you snap. And that’s it - you’ve now, officially, had a bad day. It’s tiresome. The best thing I did in Delhi was visit Humayun’s tomb (see picture below).

Next in line was Agra, a city which is right up there with Prishtina in Kosovo and Zahedan in Iran as the biggest dumps on the trip so far. People come here to see the Taj Mahal, and perhaps Agra Fort. I saw neither - I arrived late on a Wednesday, but in my head, it was a Tuesday. I planned to get up at the crack of dawn the next day to see the Taj, but, as is my habit, slept in till 12, and decided to leave it for the next day, which I thought was Thursday. So, I got up at 5.30 the next day, and strolled down to the Taj to find myself alone at the entrance. I couldn't believe my good luck - I had it all to myself! Then a rickshaw driver cycling by started chuckling away.

"Taj closed - Friday!"

"Yeah, good one mate, Taj closed!!! Very good! Except it's Thursday. Where do I buy my ticket?"

He stopped laughing. "No ticket today sir, Taj closed, it's Friday!"

I did a quick count back in my head, all the way back to the day of my arrival in India - and yes, it was a Friday. When he saw the realisation creeping into my face, he started laughing again. That was it - there was no way I was spending another day here, or giving him my fare. I walked the 45 minutes to the bus station, and hopped on a bus bound for the ghost town of Fatehpur Sikri.

Except that since it was about 6.30am, I fell asleep on the bus straight away, and woke up on arriving in Bharatpur, a further hour ahead. Anyway, I had planned to come here - it had a famous bird sanctuary. Not that I am, or ever will interested in birds, but I really needed a break from the cities, and I spent a day bird-watching, not knowing what I was looking at, but just happy to be away from the noise, filth, and general hassle of Agra.

In fact, even in Bharatpur, I couldn't get away from the chancers - cycling along, one guy just demanded 100 Rupees from me out of the blue. At first I laughed, then saw he was serious. I cycled away, shaking my head sadly, missing Pakistan, and wondering what had gone wrong in India.

Of course, I knew what I had gotten myself into by visiting this region first. I didn't start enjoying India until I got the train from Bharatpur to Jaipur - it had come all the way from Varanasi, and was jam-packed by the time I caught it, 3 hours late. I sat out the 4 hour journey at the edge of the door, with my legs dangling off the side, squeezed in beside a Sadhu. Mothers sat with legs crossed on the aisle floor, with 3, 4, sometimes 5 children around, all seemingly content with the little patch of space they claimed. Nobody complained, many people smiled, and as I watched rural Rajasthan pass by, I began to sense India's appeal.

Jaipur is the capital of Rajasthan, and has all the hassle and scams of Delhi and Agra - but the thing is, it's quite charming, and has lot of class in my opinion. It also has the smoothest hotel operation I've seen on these travels - Evergreen guesthouse had over 100 rooms, and almost the complete monopoly on back-packers in Jaipur, as well as a lot of long-term residents, mainly French and Israili, dealing in gems. However, a few days there was more than enough to get a feel for it, and I moved on to Jodhpur, this time in an empty carriage.

Rajasthan is India's most visited state - it's reckoned that 40% of foreign visitors to India have Rajasthan on their itinery. Tourists range from ageing tour groups, round-the-worlders stopping by for 4 weeks, long-term back-packers, to Old India Hands. In a way, Jodhpur is the heart of the state. With a huge fortress overlooking a sea of blue houses, the city is well worth a day. I took the audio tour of the fort, which was the best 250 Rupees I'd spent yet in India, followed by a day walking around the Old Town. Fellow blogger Aspiring Nomad - there you go mate ;) - compared Rajasthan to the Middle East, and while I've yet to visit that region, Morocco sprang to mind immediately on arrival in Jaipur, in particular the cities of Tangier and Fes.

But I was wrong - the true heart of Rajasthan is in the country-side, the rural villages. I passed through many of these on the bus ride to Pushkar, villages with women dressed in the most amazing colours, while the men, squatting a smoke chillums by the road side, wore huge red and orange turbans twice the size of their own small heads. Pushkaris a holy town, where, every November, a huge camel fair takes place, attracting hundreds of thousands of traders, camels, and tourists. I missed it of course, and arrived when the clean-up operation was taking place.

Pushkar's attraction is it's holy lake, surrounded by ghats where pilgrims bathe and wash themselves. I've been told what the place was like in the 60's and 70's, when the first foreign tourists began to arrive - a quiet, welcoming little desert oasis. Today, however, it's probably THE most spoiled town in India, the main street choc-a-bloc with hotels, shops selling cheap, crappy clothes, and a startling amount of tourists with dread-locks. What sums the place up is the so-called 'priests' who roam the ghats looking for tourists to bully into handing over money.

The scam works like this - the 'priests' approaches, offers to say a prayer for your family, gives you a string bracelet (your 'Pushkar Passport'), and demands a donation, usually about 200 Rupees. When I told my guy I didn't want a prayer, and to leave me alone, he got all stroppy, and told me I was intolerant of other beliefs. He stormed off, and I watched him for the next half hour chasing tourists around the lake. So, while the ghats are undoubtadly special, especially at sunset, Pushkar has been lost, never to return.

Next stop was the town of Bundi, slightly off the main tourist circuit of Rajasthan, but slwlyon the way to being spoiled. I spent 6 nights there - 6! I loved it, a charming little medieval town, overlooked by a palace and deserted fort, nestling beside a lake. I rented a bicycle and went out into the surrounding countryside, visited a school, a secret waterfall that nobody knows about (it's not the one mentioned in the LP), watched Seinfeld every night with my new American companion Matt, in a guest house run by eager-to-please girls. It was also my first experience with those monkeys - they now occupy the fort, making raids down to the lake-side hotels at breakfast time to snatch some food. I went to a wedding where I signed autographs, sang and danced, posed with the happy couple, and received 3 further invitations - it was the wedding season in Bundi. In Bundi, I got a glimpse of what India must have been like for the first travellers to arrive, and while the 'one pen, one rupee' brigade have well and truly arrived, the town remains unspoiled - just.

It was also good to have a new companion, and an American one at that - so far on this trip, I've found that Americans generally have more interesting and original things to say than their European counter-parts. So we headed, finally, on to the town of Chittorgarh, the sight of Rajasthan's biggest fort. 3 times in it's history the fort was sacked, and 3 times all the men rode out to meet certain defeat and death, while all the women and children immolated themselves on a huge funeral pyre following a decleration of jauher. the first defeat happened in 1303, when Ala-ud-din, the Pathan king of Delhi, besieged the fort in an attempt to capture the beautiful Rajput noblewoman Padmini. But death before dishonour is the Rajput code, and following the decleration, all the women, inclding Padmini, killed themselves. Twice more the fort was taken, in 1535, and again in 1568, and again, jauher was declared. Today, the fort stands tall and long over the town, and contains within it's walls many roads and villages, and hundreds of Hindu and Jain temples.

And so, finally, we arrived in Udaipur, famously the scene of the Bond movie 'Octopussy', which is shown here every night (I watched it a couple of nights ago, and it's not one of the better Bond movies). Apart from that, the city has a beautiful palace (where I watched shakespeare's 'Mid Summers Night Dream' last night), and a huge lake, with thwe famous Lake Palace Hotel sitting the centre. After a weak monsoon, the lake dries up, but luckily, this summer it poured down, and the lake is happily full.

So that's the story of my first month in India - I've learned that to to enjoy this place, you've got to shed every romantic notion you've got about it from movies, books, history or whatever, and learn to accept it for what it is - quite possibly the craziest country on earth.

So now I'm off to Ahmedabad tomorrow - I've got until 28th December to get to Mumbai to meet my girlfriend. So for now I'm heading into the relatively unknown states of Gujurat, and Madhya Pradesh.

Conor.

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