Potholes, Camels and Fresco Paintings

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Before leaving Delhi, we drove to the Chandni Chowk bazaar. Our trusty lonely planet book revealed the importance of this bazaar over the last hundred years and how it continued to operate in current day. However, I’m not sure I’d classify it as a bazaar, it seemed more like a street with a bunch of shops on it. Although, I’m slowly learning that bazaar in India, tends to mean just that: a bunch of shops on a street. The definition differs from the walking markets in Thailand, which are more like makeshift stands where people come from all neighborhoods to sell their goods. After a half hour of watching Sarah get stared at for being the only woman on the street, we headed back to the car for a nice long drive to Mandawa, home of the Haveli. The drive according to our hotel should take about 4 hrs, however after spending time in Thailand, I remember to double the time they say it should take. I was right, it ended up being a 9 hr drive because the new road wasn’t exactly paved properly. The abundance of potholes made it impossible to drive over 20kph, which made the drive painfully slow and made it very hard to read a book. The highlight of the drive was watching the camels along the highway pulling karts filled with a variety of goods. They’d be taking up one lane of the road (which sometimes only had one lane) with cars honking and whizzing by them constantly. Another fun sight is the tractors pulling a couple tons of grain or hay, which overflows into one huge (and I mean really big) sack. To put the size of the cargo into consideration, the cargo is about the size of four tractors and takes up both lanes of the road (if there are two lanes). Once we got to Mandawa, we found a nice hotel made from a Haveli, which is a mansion with fresco paintings on both the exterior and interior. From our night tour, we learned that the artists in the town are trying to renovate and recondition all the fresco paintings, since they are weathered from the heat and rain over the last 300 years. We bought some handmade silk art and enjoyed our hotels amazing potato curry before settling in for the night.

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