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Time to leave the golden beaches, palms and bamboo huts of South India, hard to imagine that in about 1 month most of the infrastructure is going to be disrupted leaving the beachfront at its natural state without any trace of human existence for the monsoon season, until early October everything is build up exactly in the same way for the next season of tourism mayhem. By then everything is fresh, green and nature is alive. Yet so close before Monsoon everything is dry and parched and a yellow/brown color dominated the nature, which gave me already an impression about my next set of destinations. It was time to change the scenery to a complete extend and do some “cultural stuff” so I headed on the trail to North-West Indian cities, rich in ancient palaces, temples, and stories…in fact, India never runs out of stories, ancient or modern, fictitious or real or a mix of any of the above.
After one night in the crazy streets around Main Bazar, Delhi I started my tour to the “Pink City” Jaipur, the “Venice of India” Udaipur and the “Blue City” Jodhpur with the option to proceed further West to the “Desert Oasis”
of Jaisalmer close to the border of Pakistan. All these cities are in the state of Rajasthan, which is located on the brink of the Thar Desert or Great Desert of India, building a natural border between India and Pakistan. Nice to know this in theory but once the first camels cross your way on the streets you actually REALLY know….the desert is not far anymore.
In all those cities plenty of cultural sights, museums, palaces etc. welcoming tourists for a visit. The palace of the Winds in Jaipur, the Water Palace in Udaipur and the Mehrangarh Fort in Jodhpur being the TOP sights in each city (and in fact I reduced my cultural program visiting only those). Jaipur is basically a very hectical city I didn’t want to spend much time in, Udaipur is a lovely smaller city with the famous Lake Palace (James Bond Movie Octopussy has been partly shot there in the 70s) and small rivers and Ghats, surrounded by rocky mountains one can view from one of the many rooftop restaurants. Taking the bus from Udaipur further West to Jodhpur one can get a feeling about what it is about to live in this rather
dry, bleak and comfortless strip of land with almost no more vegetation but rocks and sand, not the nice white sand like on the Southern beaches but bad, dusty, coarse red sand. Jodhpur is called the “Blue City”, when overlooking the city from the massive “Mehrangarh Fort” built on top of a huge cliff and throwing over the city, one understands where this name originates from. Approx one third of all houses are painted blue, giving a nice colorful contrast against rocky, desert surrounding.
And yes, one gets a second hint being near the desert. The temperature around 1pm reached above 40 degrees, a matter of fact actually made me kill the idea of going further East “into” the desert but change the scenery once again completely by heading North to the Mountains of Himachal Pradesh and Kashmir on the boarders to the Himalayas (Kashmir is the most Northern region of India and border territory to Pakistan – the conflict zone between both countries for centuries), a region I pictured to be in Spring time at that point….which was wrong interpretation…after 20hrs by night train through Punjab (the state most men wear turbans and Western media likes to generalizing
Indians to look alike) and a 10hrs thrilling bus ride on the verge of small, REALLY small roads up and down the mountains (a time in which I started to understand why bus crashes are reported in the newspapers daily, most of claiming the reason to be “break failure”) I felt lucky to arrive in Manali in Himachal Pradesh, a famous hill station also called “little Switzerland”. Needle trees, small wooden houses with big balconies, the snowy mountain tops of the Himalayas in the distance making it indeed hard to believe this to be still India, especially after having been to the desert in the SAME country 2 days before and remembering the paradise like beaches of the South.
It slowly occurred to me, I made to mistakes while cold crawling up my spines still wearing my sandy desert clothes.
1. 1.) I didn’t check the real weather conditions
2. 2.) I didn’t have the proper clothes as I didn’t check the real weather conditions
Bottom line, it wasn’t Spring at all yet, respectively it was but not at the temperature I imagined it to be. After two days of rather chilled temperature around 5-7 degrees
and the learning that further North it was still snowing heavily and the roads to be blocked, I decided it was enough of the extreme and I decided to go South again to a nice little town called Rishikesh at the banks of the mighty and holy Ganges River where a friend was holding his wedding in a few days.
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