Advertisement
Published: January 8th 2007
Edit Blog Post
Now this place is one of the undiscovered gems of India. Orchha is a very small village on the banks of the Betwa River- the cleanest river in India they say- and just about has more ancient palaces, temples and cenotaphs than people. The streets are virtually garbage-free since the population of the village hasn't overwhelmed its public services, and the air is fresh. However someone has taught the local kids that foreign tourists are a good source of handouts- every time we left the hotel we were greeted by a chorus of "hello pen" "hello one rupee"- I heard this in villages in Nepal as well.
To get here we took a train to from Gwalior to Jhainsi, the nearest station to Orccha. It was about an hour and a half late into Gwalior, which gave us plenty of time to observe the local colour at the station and for them to observe us- any time I looked up it was usually into the faces of 3 or 4 men who would be standing in silent groups around us just looking- never in my life have I been so interesting as I am in north India, I think. Finally
on the train I had a seat opposite two military men- one of them had his rifle tucked down the side of the seat, which is something you don't see on the Yamanote line in Tokyo!
The first few days of the trip had been very busy and quite a lot of travelling so it was great to be able to just relax and wander around the village and the ruins in Orchha. The first night we went to a dinner show at one of the old buildings near where we were staying. The star of the show was definitely an almost toothless old guy wearing a green turban, pink dress, white leggings and a gold sequinned waistcoat, finishing off his outfit with a pair of sparkly silver earrings. He played a kind of tambourine which he exchanged occasionally for a fiddle-like instrument with about 3 strings. Next was a similarly aged guy, who was much more modestly dressed, playing the harmonium, and the third member was a relatively young man on the drums- I've never been good with types of drums but I'm pretty sure it wasn't a tabla.
Partway through the second song the "dancing girl"
came out- I had thought she had kind of a strong jawline for a girl and was definitely not the prettiest Indian woman I had ever seen, but it wasn't until much later that I was told that "she" was actually a boy. Maybe it isn't done for young women from Orchha to be out late entertaining tourists, I'm not sure. Anyway he was a good dancer. As for the pink-dressed star, if I have half the energy at his age as he has I will be doing pretty well- every so often he would jump up and gallop around the stage area, singing and playing the tambourine all the time. By about 9.30 we had had enough and left- we could hear the group still going strong almost an hour later.
The next morning we visited the main palace complex of the ruins, which is currently undergoing restoration work. As usual in India, all the work was by hand and very labour-intensive. A path that would have been flattened in 30 seconds by a mechanical roller in Japan or NZ was being beaten with cricket-bat-shaped things by two women, a job which looked like it would take half
the day. I was very interested in all the different designs for the stone window screens so have included some of the many photos I took of them here.
After the visit to the palace we actually had the rest of the day free with no planned sight-seeing and the following morning as well as we decided not to go on the village tour with some of the others. The hotel we were staying at consisted of small free-standing "cottages" instead of the usual room set-up, so we spent a lot of time sitting on the veranda and practicing yoga on the lawn in the front. The third afternoon we went rafting on the Betwa River- not much in the way of rapids but a nice way to see some of the ruins. For excitement there were a lot of water fights with the other raft on the trip- the rafts weren't the self-bailing ones I've been in on white-water rafting trips in NZ either, so we had quite a lot of water sloshing around by the time we got out of the boats. Chai and sandwiches were waiting for us at the other end, which was nice because
the Betwa isn't a particularly warm river.
After drying off we went to a cooking lesson/ demonstration at a local woman's house- I can now make chai at least, haven't tried any of the other recipes yet- and then back to Jhainsi station for the overnight train to Allahabad. The train was about 2 hours late but our leader Bill had a set of travel Scrabble which meant we could give the usual crowd of observers something genuinely interesting to look at this time.
Advertisement
Tot: 0.099s; Tpl: 0.012s; cc: 11; qc: 30; dbt: 0.0241s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.1mb