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Upon arriving in India, I had mixed feelings about
the country and this has continued through to even this present moment, after almost
exactly one month traveling. After
exiting the airport in Delhi,
I discovered people and cars everywhere!
Also, that India
is dirty, dusty, noisy, polluted, smelly, beautiful, cultural, friendly, religious,
modern and historical… all at the same time.
Delhi
was a sensory overload. Lucky for me
however, I was greeted at the airport by the driver of a friend of mine. In the mass of people waiting outside the
airport, it was such a sense of relief to see a sign with my name on it and to
know that I didn’t have to worry about dealing with finding a taxi or a hotel. I met Udai in Argentina on my last trip and we
became pretty good friends after we kept running into each other on an every
other day basis for about 2 weeks. We
kept in touch after my trip and when I told him that I was going to take a trip
to India, he offered to have
Jeff and me stay at his parent’s house in Delhi
when we arrived. This was such a welcome
invitation, especially after discovering how crazy India actually is.
We stayed in Delhi
for a few days with Udai as our tour guide for one day. His family was so hospitable and his mother
helped immensely with our travel plans, suggesting little known places to stop
by and visit beautiful temples without all the other foreign tourists. And they fed us… a lot. I thought I would end up so fat if I stayed
there for more than those few days because the food was awesome and it never
stopped coming!
The first whole day, we spent in Qutb Minar, awesome ruins
just outside Delhi. The next day we spent in the noisy, dirty,
historical old city visiting many sights with the Red Fort and the Jama Masjid
as our highlights. That night, Udai
invited us to join him at the pre wedding festival of his friends. Indian weddings are really a spectacular event. They last about 4 days and every single day
is a big, extravagant, wonderful party.
The third day in Delhi
is when reality really hit us. We
decided to leave and brave the chaotic Delhi train
station to go to Agra. After we arrived, we were told to go to so
many different places and we really didn’t know what we were doing there. Unfortunately, English is not as widely used
as I thought it might be so we couldn’t read signs and the only people who
really seemed to speak English were there to scam us. Somehow we ended up at a tourist office
outside the station area where we ended up planning a trip to Rajasthan
instead. This proved to be a really good
thing and a really bad thing all together (which tends to be how everything in India really
is). The plus side was that we didn’t
have to worry about booking hotels, trains or tours for more than two
weeks. The bad side was that we had a
crazy man for a driver (his name was Kuku… go figure) and we probably spent
much more money on accommodation and food than we planned.
Let’s start with Kuku and his Tata (the brand of fancy car
here which is really just a piece of crap with wheels). The first night, after leaving Delhi, we were supposed
to have a 5 hour car ride to Mandawa.
This actually proved to be a much longer car ride (maybe 7 or 8 hours)
and the fact that the car broke down on five different occasions didn’t
help. Apparently, the tube connecting
the coolant to the engine broke and the car overheated. We had to stop in every little town for the
last 4 hours of the trip to fill it with water.
Then, when we didn’t make it to a town at around 3am, Kuku
stopped the car, put his seat in the reclining position started to go to sleep. At this point, I was exhausted and pissed off
and was not going to have any of that. I
told Kuku that we were not going to stay on the side of the road, so he had
Jeff get out of the car and push it so it would start… with the help of some
random dude walking down the road with his camel. We finally arrived in our dilapidated car at
our hotel at sometime after 4am (more than 12 hours after we started)… only to
be woken up by the morning prayer of the Hindus chanting away. We didn’t get much sleep.
From here the Tata really didn’t hold up very well. Mandawa was nice little quiet town and we
wandered around for a few hours before taking off to Bikaner.
After we finally made it to Bikaner,
Kuku had to take the car to get fixed so we had to find our own mode of
transport around the town, even though the purpose of hiring Kuku was to take
us around. We ended up being stuck in Bikaner for an extra day
because the mechanic couldn’t fix the problems of the Tata in one day. Luckily Bikaner
was an interesting place to get stranded.
We visited the fort and palaces and watched a lovely show while drinking
some terrible Indian wine.
The next stop was Jaisalmer, which is pretty much like a
giant sandcastle. It is in the desert in
Rajasthan close to the Pakistani border.
When we arrived in our hotel, it was really magical looking out the
window at the fort walls lit up with a backdrop of sparkling stars. Inside the fort itself was really incredible
too as it is still a working city.
Unfortunately, the fort and city within the fort at Jaisalmer may not be
around for much longer because providing water for the growing population and
tourists in the fort is destroying it… think of dumping water on top of a sand
castle. From Jaisalmer we took a short car ride to Kauri where we went on a
camel safari and slept in the desert under the stars. Camels are truly the least comfortable form
of transport… especially when they run… especially if you are a girl…
After we left Jaisalmer, we started to run into some
problems with Kuku again. For some
reason he liked to take us on his errands with him rather than doing them while
he was waiting for us while we were on our tours. So, we had to go to the dry cleaners and then
the pharmacy and then he actually took us to the hospital with him to see a
doctor because he was sick. After being
at the hospital for almost an hour and realizing that we would be there for at
least several hours more, we sat Kuku down and had a little chat with him about
how he needed to take care of this business in the multitude of hours he had
when he wasn’t driving us around. From
there, things definitely improved and the only problem we had after that was a
flat tire.
We finally arrived in Jodhpur,
which at first impression was a stinky, dirty, terrible city. I thought I was going to hate it while we
were driving through trying to find our hotel.
Luckily, first impressions are not always right and I found that I
actually loved the city and all the people I had met there. We had some great experiences including
meeting a family that invited us in to have some tea and dessert with them. The fort in Jodhpur was probably my favorite of all the
forts we saw in Rajasthan and the “blue city” was really a wonderful place to
wander around.
From Jodhpur, we went to Udaipur, the city that my
friend Udai was named after. Udaipur is really
beautiful and magical. Unfortunately,
something that would have been one of the highlights of the trip, eating a
fancy dinner at the Lake
Palace hotel, was not
allowed and therefore we could only look at the Palace from afar. Udaipur
was a great place to just sit by the lake and watch everything that was going
on around you.
Next, we went to Pushkar which was a small, quiet town and a
welcome break to all the big cities we had been to so far. I did some shopping and went for a nice sunrise
hike to a temple at the top of a hill. I
also learned how to make chapatti (a type of Indian bread).
After Pushkar, we went to Jaipur, the capital of
Rajasthan. Even though this was a really
big city with more than a million people, it was really somewhat pleasant with
lots to see. We took our second chance
with some Indian wine and determined that we probably won’t drink any for the
rest of the trip. It’s not very good
wine. We also went to yet another palace
and then a strange observatory where maharajas experimented with time and the
celestial world.
The last day of Rajasthan was in Ranthambore where we
unsuccessfully went to see tigers. All that
resulted from that trip was Jeff getting really sick off the side of our cantor
and me getting pictures of deer and antelopes making faces at me… literally,
every single picture I took was with an animal with it’s tongue sticking
out. Overall the park was nice and it
was good to see some nature… it was just a little bit of a disappointment.
After Rajasthan, we went to Agra and I’m just going to have to wait until
next time to write more…
