Incredible India

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September 8th 2008

Published: September 19th 2008

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Ben and Sarah

Delhi

young school boys insist on a photo taken of them..

A cow walks aimlessly down a busy road. A hawker spots a tourist from afar and prepares their gimmick for action. A women sells fresh fruit on the side of a busy polluted road. A dog relieves himself in the middle of a crowded bazaar. A family of five fly past on their barely safe motorbike. Some not so uncommon sights to see here…amazing, frustrating, colourful, filthy…we can tell already we are going to have a love/hate relationship with India.

The first thing that anyone is going to notice when first travelling in India is the attention you get as a foreigner. Everyone just stares, mostly males, and mostly at me. We have people grabbing us to get their photos taken with us and others coming up to shake our hands…it’s crazy! At one of the forts we visited, we had a tour guide who spoke Hindi to the thirty or so Indians with us, and then English to Ben and I. At one point…he even said to us that we were more of a tourist attraction than the fort, as the majority of people just watched us instead of taking any notice of what he was saying!

But

Agra

taj mahal.. an iconic picture that you must have on a visit to India

from the beginning…we arrived into Delhi a little scared, and just hoping that our hotel had gotten our request for an airport pickup. We braced ourselves as we left the security of the arrivals hall and ventured out to the desperate crowd of taxi drivers waiting for us on the other side. We spoke to them in a friendly manner and with a smile… traits that you soon lose after a few days of being hassled. Luckily we found our driver waiting for us…I have never been so happy to see Ben’s name written on a piece of paper before! The air was hot and thick and we were dripping sweat by the time we reached the air conditioning of the car. We spent most of the trip with our noses glued to the windows in amazement at what we were seeing. The streets are crazy…cows, rickshaws, people, dogs…all shared the road with the cars, trucks and motorbikes… frankly, we were shocked we only saw one accident en route!

Our driver seemed a nice enough man, with fairly good English and very friendly…he started to talk to us about the “government agency” that he worked for, who could organise

Jaipur

One of our more impressive and memorable food experiences at Natraj in Jaipur - a famous Thali dish

a car and driver to take us around Rajasthan. We had heard of this before and were interested in checking it out…so we agreed to have him pick us up the following day and take us to see his agency. Now, before I go any further, we had read in the Lonely Planet (or as we like to call it, ‘the bible‘), that there was actually only one official government tourist office in Delhi, so we were interested to see whether that was where we were to be taken…turned out not to be. Every travel agency in Delhi has “government approved” plastered all over it…which as you can imagine, makes it a little hard for us poor, bewildered backpackers, who are terrified of being ripped off!! Even though the deal that we were offered by this agency seemed fine to us, we decided that we had better be smart and see the official ‘official tourist office’ before making any decisions…the problem was, we had agreed to a tour of Delhi with our driver, so we had to figure out a way to get away from him before we were taken back to his boss in the afternoon…luckily, we are both

Jaipur

a man selling stones on the busy sidewalk.. I gave him 10 rupees for the photo as you feel obliged..

pretty sneaky so we knew we would be able to work something out.

After seeing the sights, we told the driver we wanted to go and see a market in Connaught Place, which surprise surprise, was where the tourist office we wanted to go to was. He seemed reluctant and kept suggesting other places for us to see, but we insisted and he eventually dropped us off near the market…telling us he would wait there and we would meet him in an hour. So we walked off towards the market, with a friendly wave and smile back at our driver. As soon as we turned a corner, we broke into a run…if you can imagine the mission impossible music or something similar here, it might help you to visualise our break for freedom…at a crouch, we continued, half expecting our driver to pop up in front of us with an “aha…gotcha!”. But we made it, managing even to dodge the cars as we ran across the road. After speaking to the tourist office, they directed us to the one travel agency in the city that has been government approved….even though we did go with these guys in the end,

Jaipur

some labourers at work on a Fort in Jaipur

and they were fantastic…turns out they were government owned, and hence why the only agency that was approved. But that’s India for you!

That evening we decided to go for a bit of a walk around our hotel…try some food and maybe a little shopping…well that lasted all of about 10 minutes! From the minute we stepped out of the hotel, we got stared at by an overwhelming amount of eyes, usually male and gazing in my direction…I even got a few kisses blown at me! It was a little intimidating to say the least…especially having just arrived in India! It wasn’t helped by the fact that we seemed to be the only foreigners in the area we were staying…needless to say, we got back to the hotel pretty quickly!

The following morning, we were collected by our driver for the next 12 days…Lalit. He was a lovely man, spoke excellent English and as we were extremely happy to find out, was a very good driver!! We felt completely safe in the car with him (which if you have ever been on the Indian roads, will know what an amazing statement that is!), and often fell asleep on

Jaipur

our elephant ride down the street and back again - very exotic.

the long drives from place to place.

Our first stop was Agra and the Taj Mahal. We didn’t really get to see a lot of Agra, we were only there for one night and we arrived quite late in the day…but that’s okay, the main reason we were there was to see the Taj Mahal and that we did! What an amazing building…made completely of marble, it was built by an Emperor as a memorial for his second wife who died giving birth to their 14th child. Was lovely to walk around and through the building, only slightly marred by the fact that it started to rain. As much as we enjoyed visiting the Taj, it was here that we got our first taste of ‘tourist prices’, which we encountered all through Rajasthan. For an Indian to see the Taj Mahal it cost 20 Rupees…for a foreigner, it was 750. And this happened everywhere!!

Next stop Jaipur, or the Pink City as it is known…in 1876 the Maharaja painted the entire old city pink, a colour associated with hospitality, to welcome the Prince of Wales, and the tradition has since been maintained. It is a bustling town full

Jaipur

a street stand in action amoungst a bustling street in Jaipur

of people, bazaars and rickshaws…it was a crazy place that we thoroughly enjoyed! We had our first taste of shopping here…haggling with the shop keepers, bartering with the market stall owners and ignoring the hawkers who try at every step to get you into their shops. “Hello! Which Country? First time India? You come, visit my shop!”…was like a broken record repeating itself everywhere we went. I also brought myself some Indian clothing…to try and stand out a little less as, which I think I mentioned previously, Ben and I get quite a bit of attention here…me especially. Can be a little disconcerting.

From Jaipur we headed to Pushkar, which was our first small town and we loved it! They seemed to be a bit more used to tourists here, and it is actually the first place where we saw quite a few other foreigners around! Pushkar is a Hindi pilgrimage town, as the lake here is considered holy, and we saw many pilgrims making their way there and bathing in the water. Was quite a magical atmosphere…sitting by the lake, with the bell ringing as pilgrims walked underneath it, and music sounding from the temples. Our hotel even

Jaipur

a cow wonders care free in to the traffic

had a pool! Not that we used it…but it sounds good nonetheless.

After Pushkar, we headed to Udaipur, the City of Lakes…where part of the James Bond movie Octopussy was filmed. Udaipur is a beautiful place, on the edge of a lake, surrounded by hills…very different to the desert we had been driving through. Again, we loved it here…would have loved to have spent more than only the 2 nights we had exploring the town. We happened to be in Udaipur for the festival to celebrate the birth of Krishna. Was amazing to be a part of…the streets were crowded with people…the Hindi music was blaring, and they had a competition to see who could break a glass ball thing full of paint. Basically, young men were making human pyramids to get high enough to grab the ball and break it…with the crowd throwing water to make them slippery…and the winners getting 11,000 rupees! Was funny to watch…although from what we heard there were a few broken limbs at the end! We also had our first taste of the monsoon here! The rain started as we arrived at the 50 rupee (A$1.50) all you can eat restaurant we had

Jaipur

lake palace in Jaipur

found (bargain!). By the time we had finished and managed to find a rickshaw to take us back to the hotel…the streets were flooded , people were wading in water up to their knees and kids were having a wonderful time splashing around in the streets! We were lucky to get back to our hotel…I didn’t think the little rickshaw was going to make it!

Next stop…Jodphur. Famous for the Meherangarh Fort and known as the Blue City as many of the buildings in the old city are painted a vibrant shade of blue. As much as Jodphur itself wasn’t much to write home about, Meherangarh was one of the stand out monuments for us. Incredibly well organised and well run…the admission price included an audio tour and our camera! We were shocked… The fort itself was a massive structure, built into the rocky hill and towering over Jophur city…with scars from cannon balls in the walls and pilgrims making their way up the winding streets. Near one of the gates, there are numerous tiny hand prints on the wall. These are the hand prints of the Maharajas wives who, when he died, followed his funeral procession through the

Jaipur

women labourers in a palace. The men here have it pretty well worked out as the women do a lot of manual labour.

streets before throwing themselves on the fires of his funeral pyre. The story goes that they sat there silently, not making a sound as they burned…

From Jodphur we drove to Jaisalmer…and by now we were getting mighty sick of being in the car!! Jaisalmer is the desert city and it is where we did our camel safari. It was a beautiful place, everything made out of the same sandstone…it is what you would expect an old golden city of the desert to look like…something from the movies that doesn’t seem quite real. We enjoyed exploring the old fort streets, looking through shops and sitting Maharaja style to enjoy our meals (on cushions on the ground with low tables). The second night we were there we headed out into the desert to our ’desert camp’ for the evening. It was kind of strange because, as it is not the tourist season, we were the only ones there! We loved it though…went out on a camel ride for a couple of hours and to watch the sunset, before returning to our camp for food and the entertainment of some Rajasthani music being played for us. The following morning we were

Jaisalmer

the impressive fort in Jaisalmer - the desert city

up at 5am to take the camels out again to see the sunrise. It was beautiful as you can see from the photo…and as much as Ben grumbled and grunted at me when I made him get up and get on the camel again…I am pretty sure that he enjoyed it too. And a little tip for the ladies…when riding a camel, wear a sports bra…a trotting camel is a very bumpy ride!

The next couple of days were a blur of driving…we stopped for two more nights at Bikaner and Mandawa, but we arrived so late and left so early, that we didn’t really do much at either except eat! But we enjoy eating...the food here is absolutely incredible! We have become particularly attached to the dishes aloo jeera and palak paneer...served with chapati and all washed down with a nice cold drink...mmm...yum...

All in all the trip was fantastic…the only downsides being the amount of time in the car, and the fact that we couldn’t stay longer at the places we loved. As I write this we are sitting in Rishikesh, in the cool mountain air, waiting for our 8 day trek to start tomorrow…but that