I keep worrying about leaving one place to go to the next--feeling there's no way it can compare with where I currently am. But I have to move at a fast clip to complete my survey of Rajasthan--it's part of the just-barely-keeping-my-hands-on-the-reins joy of this part of the trip--and India keeps surprising me. Now I'm in spectacular Udaipur, where the two constant descriptions heard are "fairy tale" and "James Bond," and it actually manages to straddle the gap between fairly well. Slightly more sedate and relaxed than 007 (there were never so many septuagenarians in the camera's line in Bond), and a touch more classy and sophisticated than a child's tale, it's a wonderful, romantic, and picturesque town with an old palace in the middle of the lake (now a pricey hotel).
I arrived after a bumpy, restless night on a sleeper bus, figuring I'd nap most of the day, but didn't feel my eyelids' weight once until I my head hit the pillow at 11 that night. They had no interest in closing, with so much to see. Temples dot the town, with one in the center of town being one of the most intricate, well carved, and largest Hindu temples I've yet seen. Music is everywhere, and mostly percussion-based. My path yesterday was guided, in part, by where the drumming was emanated from. The most pleasant surprise was stumbling upon a wedding celebration held the day before the marraige, where the wife and groom each conduct prayers at a temple, asking for a blessed marraige and children. The prayers ain't catholic mass, though. They are backed by furious drums (the drums here are mostly double-sided, with differences in pitch determined either by different sized heads, or different sized sticks) and accompanied by women family and friends joyfully enacting a traditional Rajasthani circular dance, moving counter-clockwise, and waving their arms gracefully about.
Another epitaph applied to this city is "Venice of the East," and it does have a more European flair than any other city I've been to in India, most delightfully noticeable in the Epicurean pleasures in which I've whole-heartedly indulged myself. Many restaurants are rooftop-based, with amazing views of the lake palace, the royal palace, and the delicate white stone buildings dotting the opposite side of the channel running through the center of town. Yesterday I had dinner at sunset atop a rooftop that I had eyed from my own hotel's roof, but had over- or under-shot several times, finding out when I summited the restaurant I arrived at that now the desired terrace was just NORTH of me, or just WEST of me. The sun sets over a beautiful series of hills far beyond the town, and a gorgeous golden eagle or hawk of some kind was soaring right around my terrace. As dusk falls, lights come on on the walls of the buildings on the water. For the most part, I really enjoy traveling alone--you end up spending much more time talking to and finding out about locals and fellow travelers and their cultures, and can keep to your own pace if you want to leave the town you just arrived in the next day, or spend the whole afternoon reading in a cafe. And there are some beauties that are better experienced alone. But that sunset was just too much beauty for one pair of eyes to do justice to--and I tried my damndest, not blinking for an hour and a half. It was a sight than only two or more people together could fully take in. It made me reflect on the wonderful sights and sounds I've experienced with you all, my friends and family. Wheatfields, sunsets, parks, waterfalls, and junkyards in Walla Walla. Listening and dancing to orchestras, rock bands, and old fogies in concert halls, clubs, amphitheaers, cars, dorms, and kitchens. Rafting, hiking, snowboarding, skiiing, snowshoing, digging for crystals in every single state or province in the West, and a few in the midwest and east. Wandering cities, going to museums and bars. Camping on canyons edges, in canyon valleys, on sides of mountains, tops of mountains, in bedrooms, on golf courses, and, of course, one amazing old mining town in the Cascades. Conversations in coffee shops, classrooms, living rooms, bedrooms. Beef quesadillas in a fluorescently-lit kitchen, and Indian food in the U-district. And countless other incomparable experiences. It was a damn fine sunset, and made me think of everyone of you, and just how lucky I am. So cheers to you all.
Afterward, I hit up a traditional Rajasthani dance performance, which included dances with pots of burning fire on women's heads, an amazing sitting dance where the women had small cymbals placed on various parts of their body, and, with coordination to make Joe Dimaggio blush, quickly, and accurately, struck them by swinging the cymbal tied to about a foot-long string in their right hand just like a sling, or a mini tetherball around their fingers, at the various other cymbals, increasing in tempo to be striking the little cympals at about 180 strikes per minute. I'm not sure if that's clear. It's hard to describe, but it was mind-blowing, and hard to believe even as I sat there watching it. There was a hilarious puppet show of a libidous woman, whose sound effects were provided by some kind of instrument in the puppeteer's mouth that made a noise akin to the most beserk pigeon imaginable--a high pitched, trilling noise, variable in pitch, but giving the impression that this woman had been driven crazy by her loins and was now catapulting and cavorting around the stage in feverish lust. And the finale was a water jug bearing dance by a stout woman who by the end was carrying nine jugs atop her head, at least seven feet tall, if not eight, and, as they were added, managed to lie down flat next to a vase with a scarf on it, grab the scarf in her teeth, and stand up again, revealing the flowers in the vase, do a tap dance on a plate with her feet on the inch-tall rim, and do a tender little dance on broken glass.
Okay that's probably enough. Off to Pushkar tonight to haggle for some camels for David Hennings.
Thinking of you,
Dave
