Rajasthan

Jaipur City Tour

Posted on by Laughingnomad

Jaipur is the capital of Rajasthan and sits on a dry lake bed surrounded by barren hills at the top of which you can see fort-like edifices and the surrounding fort walls. The all day city tour bus with no A/C left from the railroad station and proceeded to take us to what seemed like every historical building possible in Jaipur!

The entry fees and camera fees for foreigners were many times over the fees for the locals and the soft drinks were four times the normal price which needless to say really pissed off Bob (he just wants to pay the fair and going price) which was ok with me because I am more interested in people than old empty buildings. (The two young college students on the tour from Bangladash were cheating by posing as Indians). An expensive elephant ride around a small courtyard was being utilized only by a few Japanese tourists. You had to pay an entrance fee to see the recently built white marble Hindu temple. Then you had to pay an offering inside the temple to see the inner temple. If you entered with a camera there was additional charge–quadruple for a video cam. Then you had to pay 5 rupees to go to the bathroom afterwards. You get nickel and dimed to death. Very frustrating.

For the remainder of the tour we stayed behind the rest when they toured the buildings and lingered in the streets to watch the kalaidoscope of passing shapes and colors…multi colored tribal women on the sidewalk selling soft green grass to passersby so they could gain graces by feeding the many cows that occupied the parking lot…15 little boys laughing and wanting to shake hands…one woman squatting in front of a wall to pee on a sidewalk…have a look in my shop…no charge for looking…barber shaving a patron in his pavement shop…men in white dhobis (like a sari that is pulled up between the legs) pushing handcarts and traditionally dressed Rajput men in bright colored turbans and handlebar moustaches. The newest and nicest building we saw in Jaipur is a three year old government building!

The tour guide makes his presentations in both Hindi and English (all the riders are Indian and Hindi-speaking except us) but only now and then do we catch a word and realize he is now speaking English! The two boys from Bangladash ask why we do not enter some of the palaces/temples. When I explain that we feel like human ATM machines, they sympathetically suggest that maybe the high prices for foreigners can be adjusted. I tell them we are more interested in the people anyway and they smile. The boys have completed two years of university study in Bangladash and have applied to study in the US. Moving to America seems to be every young Asian person’s dream but getting a visa these days, they say, is very difficult.

On the way to another ancient empty building we follow a rocking camel pulling a handcart piled high with 25 foot long metal pipe…the camel has only one speed and one direction…on this street we see many pavement dwellers-babies, naked toddlers, mothers…those not at home have their few belongings covered over with burlap or plastic..the driver lets us off several blocks from our hotel but instead of taking an auto-rickshaw or taxi we walk back to the hotel in the middle of the street along with the rest of the pedestrians thereby avoiding the urine soaked sidewalk…funny how quickly you can get used to this life if instead you are paying attention to the people…women beautiful with long shiny black oiled hair in colorful flowing saris that provide a foil to the grey dirty surroundings looking to see what is in their eyes… Never again, however, will I complain about the transportation taxes or the garbage, sewer and water bills at home unless at some future time I decide I like sewer water and garbage in my streets and a man carrying my new dishwasher up the hill on his back.

We drive through the famous “Pink City” which is the 250 year old part of the town. Doesn’t look pink to me…looks like a dirty rust color much like the mud huts in Africa or red clay kasbahs in Morocco…and don’t think it was repainted since the first time 250 years ago.

The bus transfers us into four wheel drives and up a winding road we go to the Amber Fort to view yet another palace and have lunch. I sit on a concrete wall alone for a few minutes to write in my journal and wait for the others to gather when I am quickly approached by about six laughing men in their 30’s or 40’s who shake my hand and want to know where I am from…then they traced a swooping convex shape in the air with their hands and arms and asked if I did this…what does that mean, I ask, and they all laugh and move away…not interested anymore. I tell Bob that I think I was just propositioned…

Jaipur India

Posted on by Laughingnomad

July 22-26 2002
The next day we discover we are the only guests in the Hotel Meghniwas and we have breakfast in the quiet restaurant downstairs. The night before Bob had a few minutes of the sweats but no fever…this morning he complains about not
feeling well…bones ache…no energy…tired…. I am silent and surly…but thanks be to the gods we hole up in our comfortable room all day watching movies on the HBO channel aware that this is our first bout of good old culture shock.

Culture Shock
I am having my first bout of culture shock on this journey. (My other culture shock experience in reverse was upon return to the States from a summer hitchhiking in Europe in 1965). Lonely Planet says there are several stages to this phenomenon. The first is the honeymoon stage-euporia and excitement-but the novelty quickly wears off and then comes the disintegration stage where instead of being thrilled you find yourself really disliking this new culture-right now in India it is because of the malodorous air, heat and noise.

Then you hit the reintegration stage when you grit your teeth and just get on with it because your return ticket isn�t for another six months! You blame every little problem on your host culture and become snarlingly hostile-for example, daring the next person to approach you for money.

By the autonomous stage you begin to focus on revising your travel style that is based on a more realistic assessment of local conditions…like never deliberately putting yourself at the mercy of a lunatic taxi driver. And we are realizing that underneath the layers of cacaphony there is an implicit order to the culture..very poor people finding the most efficient way to live that works for them…the many are not just individually lost on the sidewalks but are part of the community of their nearest neighbors…trading support and solace…ensuring survival.

Finally the interdependence stage is supposed to arrive when you develop an emotional bond with the new culture. Lonely Planet says this will take some time and effort but it will happen. We are not there yet we feel it coming…maybe…

Supposedly the more you know about the new culture before travelling the easier it will be…but god help me I don�t think there is anything that can prepare a westerner for India. What this experience WILL definitely do for you is cure you of any sense of feeling privileged or of being a more valuable person than the locals, just because you are American or have money or position, that you ever had or ever thought of having. Everyone endures the same conditions in the same way. In the movie “The Mexican” Brad Pitt cockily tells the cop “I am American!” The cop just looks at him and says “I am Mexican!”

Hotel Meghniwas
We luck out with a hotel that is well off the noisy street with grass and trees all around and a swimming pool in the back. The proprietors are professional and the staff is very friendly and helpful. After a nice quiet solitary Indian buffet dinner in the hotel restaurant we are invited by the proprietors, Mr. & Mrs. Singh, to have a drink with them in their office. Their two sons were educated in the states and live there still-one has a software business in Seattle and the other lives in New York. Mr. Singh is an articulate retired military person who has a good knowledge of Indian and US history and for an hour we appreciate his reasoned analysis of Indian, US and Arab domestic and foreign policies.

He says that the US and India got off on the wrong foot with each other years ago when Nehru, an aristocratic man that was highly educated in England, visited President Truman in the US. On the return to India Nehru remarked what a buffoon (or some such word) Truman was and US intelligence picked up the comment which injudiciously got back to Truman. Mr. Singh goes on to say that he thinks that in the next 5-10 years India and the US will become very very good friends because they will be the two biggest democracies facing the threat of China. Bob says that he has seen some very expensive looking homes in Jaipur and wants to know who would be living there. Mr. Singh answers that there are three upper class groups of people in India-first business owners, then politicians and then bureaucrats. I think that some of my friends and I who have worked for the state for years have been living in the wrong country!

Then Bob asks Mr. Singh what he thinks about the Pakistani/Indian conflict. He says the hostilities are old and the two countries have been threatening each other for years but there is a balance of power because both countries have nuclear capability. Furthermore, he flatly stated that this conflict is historical, it is not a situation defined by war and that India is not going to release a bomb just because a few villagers and politicians were killed in a couple terrorist raids!

He went on to say that people here are living life normally and the State department warning has ruined tourism that was already bad because of 9/11 and the off-season. The media carried the news today that the warning has been lifted but the damage has been done, he says.

Later I read an article in the India Times Magazine that reported that local corporate executives never did send their American expat employees home and furthermore they think the warning was timed to coincide with an orchestrated international move to pressure India and Pakistan to talk peace. The article, entitled “The Triggered Exodus” ends by saying that “the wait is now only for the nuclear silly season to end.”

Mr. Singh has some interesting but very big questions for Bob: are intra-uterine cures possible yet…are we close to human cloning…Bob tells him in all seriousness that he thinks man is headed for extinction and then the proprietor spends 20 minutes telling him how it is already slowly happening in India. Global warming and the resulting drought will leave Jaipur without water within two years.

We excuse ourselves when his brother and his wife come to the door and after Bob had been bitten by their dog. Should have opted for the rabies shots as suggested before we left home!

Pushkar India

Posted on by Laughingnomad

The driver has to ask 5 times for directions to Pushkar (no male pride here). Upon entering the village a guy sitting at a table lets down a red and white pole barrier and asks for a 15 rupee village tax. This is only for tourist cars…Bob says disgustedly that Oregon is really dumb.

In high season the ghats (steps or landing to the lake) will be full but this day there is hardly anyone at the ghats to bathe and obtain blessings in the holy water of Pushkar Lake-only a few young backpackers lounging at a refreshment table near the water. On the way back to the car we came upon two young men who were here from Delhi to take their engineer exams so they can qualify for a job on the railroad. Always the first question is “How do you like India”� Always I answer that I like India very much-especially the people. I beat them to the invariable next question: “Do you have children”� It is good in India to have sons.

Back to the road to Jaipur I see a sign advertising the “Pink Floyd Cafe Hotel…Wish You Wear Hear.” On the way out of the village there is a sign: “Thank’s.” We see men and women working on the road excavation in 100 degree heat loading gravel into the back of a truck using shallow pans carried on their heads…a man on a tractor with a hot pink turban…no speed limit and no cops on the road…hundreds of trucks waiting to load acres of marble…trucks all orange and painted with various designs…trucks are king of the road in India too…tribal woman with red over pink and orange over purple and flowered and multicolored and rings and big jewelry in their noses…we see STD everywhere but it stands for the State Telephone Department not Sexually Transmitted Disease.

The two lane Highway is being widened to four lanes with funds borrowed from the World Bank. But not in time for us with cars passing trucks honking that are passing trucks honking with motorcycles here and there honking on each side and in and out…camels pulling carts on the shoulders…at night vehicles use no lights honking…only for signaling an emergency like horns in the US. The last 12 miles are in the dark and by the time we get to Jaipur I am a frazzle…I have a headache from the diesel fumes…my ears hurt…no more road travel for me in the third world! And then I’ll be damned…after passing all those trucks…honking honking…the driver pulls over for tea!

Chittorgarh India

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On the way out of town the next morning, I am not surprised to see a dead cow that had been hit by a car. “The government will come and pick it up for the hide, (an hopefully not the meat) the taxi driver says, but the owner will be saying “where is my cow…”

Our travel options to the city of Jaipur is overnight sleeper bus, overnight sleeper train or taxi by day. Since we wanted to see the village of Pushkar and the countryside we opted for the taxi. Big mistake! National highway number 8 from Mumbai to Delhi is a narrow two lane road with bumper to bumper trucks with “please blow the horn” on the back of every truck; we know that India’s commerce is alive and well. Requirements for vehicle registration include good brakes, good horn and good luck. (Not necessarily in that order.)

It is Sunday and motorcyclists with women in beautiful saris sitting sideways on the back are traveling 50 miles to a Jain temple for a special festival. We see big shiny aluminum pots lined up on stoves in roadside stands. We stop for tea and see garbanzos, dried green peas and lentils soaking-waiting to be cooked for the day’s meal in the evening.

I had assumed that the brand new Indian-made car would have A/C but unfortunately it doesn’t and soon I am very irritable. I forsake tea for a watermelon flavored Fanta. We sit on plastic woven beds with rusted metal frames provided for people for their afternoon tea and rest. Children riding by on their bikes laugh and wave. We don’t know what to make of the staring adults and laughing children…

The road to Cittorgarh was on a flat plateau and we see the Fort, our first destination, high on a hill. The driver drives so fast through the town it is hard to see anything. Lonely Planet says the Fort epitomises the whole “romantic doomed ideal of Rajput chivalry.”

Three times the Fort was sacked, the last time by the Mughal emperor, Akbar, and on each occasion “jauhar” was declared in the face of impossible odds: the men donned the saffron robes of martyrdom and rode out from the the Fort to certain death, while the women and children immolated themselves on a huge funeral pyre-the second time a whopping 32,000 men and 13,000 women losing their lives. Apparently, honour was more important than life for these people. Today the Fort is a ruins but about 5000 people still live within it’s confines.

Mr. Singh’s Rickshaw In Udaipur

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We take the offer of Mr. Singh, the Sikh driver of an auto-rickshaw, a small, noisy, three-wheeled motorized contraption with no doors, to take us around the narrow streets that are filled with cows, people, dogs, pigs, men in dirty white dhotis (sarong which is pulled up between the legs) pushing handcarts, seller stands and motorcyles piled high with the entire family, other auto-rickshaws and cars that travel ridiculously fast, narrowly missing each other…trusting cows just lie down right in the middle of it all.

We go nuts taking pictures…Bob, over here, over here…in the local market with picture-perfect fruit and vegetables sold by tribal (adivasi) women sellers in colorful saris. The women laugh and put their hands to their mouths when they see themselves on the screen of the digital camera. Once in awhile, a woman will decline a picture and we respect her desire.

Mr. Singh tells us that the “higher cultured” women who have knowledge of the Indian religious texts (vedas) will want to follow the dictum of the sacred texts that say your image should not be reproduced. But the women loved having their pictures taken and I suspect the truth is that the tribal women have their own beliefs that may or may not include the texts of the vedas.

However, I was really touched by one middle class Indian tourist family from the state of Gujurat who handed me their year-old baby to hold-as if they they thought it would be a blessing for the child. Bob took a picture of the child and the father and as we walked away we heard a man calling us from behind. We looked around to see him running up the hill in his brown slacks and blue shirt. He wanted us to send him a copy of the picture so after a few more pictures of the whole family we copied down his address-we will have another pen pal.

Shilpgram Cooperative & Cultural Center
We were the only tourists in the center that has displays of traditional houses from the states of Rajasthan, Gujarat, Goa and Mahashtra. We pass by musicians and dancers that, bored to death, happily perform only for us and laugh when they see themselves on Bob’s video screen.

Monsoon Palace
For a breathtaking view of the entire valley, Mr. Singh’s rickshaw chugs up to the highest point in the foothills around the little valley to the Monsoon Palace built in the 1800’s by one of the Maharajas. The Palace is lit at night and from our hotel looks magical. But we don’t understand a word he says in his Indian accent as he describes the history of the palace!

Natraj Hotel Restaurant
For dinner Mr. Singh suggested we eat at the Natraj Hotel in the flat new part of the city. The word “new” is relative of course because it looks no different than the old city. The vegetarian restaurant full of men starved at the end of the work day serves a set-price thali (all you can eat) for 50 rupees or about $1.00.

Nine or ten barefoot waiters in dirty shirts and pants come around again and again with metal containers of potato masala, dahl (lentil soup), curd (yogurt), mattar paneer (peas and chunks of soft cheese in sauce), sabzi (curried vegetables), some other things I have forgotten or don�t know the name of, and chapatis and rice. The next day we are sick–the “GI’s” or locally known as the Delhi Delight.

Tea on the Hill at Sunset
As I am arranging to have some clothing repaired by old Mr. Basir Mohead at his tailor shop Mr. Singh happens along. We invite him to tea with us so we jump in his rickshaw and he takes us to the top of a quiet hill with a view of Lake Pachola where there are some picniking locals and a modest tea stall. While we drink our tea and are watch a soothing sunset, Mr. Singh remembers that the day before I had asked him where we could listen to some music and he offers to take us to his Sikh temple where a special pundit (chanter) that was booked a year in advance will be performing with tabla and drums.

Sikh Temple
At least 5 friendly greeters walk up and welcome us to the temple, give us little kerchiefs to cover our heads and take our shoes. Children stand around and stare and laugh-some attempting to walk up to us and talk but as soon as we make a move forward they pull back. The temple is jampacked, men on one side and women on the other, all sitting cross-legged knee to butt on the floor. I find a place in the back next to an older woman where I can lean up against the wall. I cannot get her to smile for the life of me. The music and voices were very soothing. I had hoped we could last until 11pm when about a thousand members of the temple would have a meal together that had been prepared earlier in the evening but between my loose stools and numb butt I decide at about 9:30 I have had enough and motion to Bob.

On the way out of the temple yard, Mr. Singh introduces us to his children, nieces and nephews who excitedly shake our hands and wish us goodbye. (The temple was full and many were listening to the music in the temple yard.) This close knit community has shared a very special evening with us.

Udaipur India

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July 18-21 2002
To make it easy on ourselves we left at 4am for a one-hour flight north to Udaipur in the state of Rajasthan. When the taxi pulled out we noticed the food stall down the street was still doing a brisk business at that hour. And with the exception of upscale Marine Drive along the bay, the streets on both sides all the way to the airport were covered at intervals with neighborhoods of pavement dwellers.

Our hotel in Udaipur, the Caravanserai (a word meaning traditional accommodation for camel caravans) is built entirely out of stunning white marble-floors, stairs, bannisters, walls-quarried about 50 miles away.

We have a view of Lake Pichola which is drying up because of the drought that has sadly plagued northern India for the last five years. The famous Lake Palace Hotel usually out in the middle of the lake is now actually on the bank.

This year’s expected monsoon has not arrived as yet–late with no rain predicted. Indiginous tribal women (adivasis) in their brightly colored saris with contrasting choli’s (sari blouses) crouch on their heels at the dhobi ghats (place for laundering) on small platforms out in the water to launder clothes and bathe themselves. Our hotel is on one of the tangle of streets in the old city and after a short walk we pile into bed for a nap.

The Internet Cafe
The internet cafe around the corner is run by a good looking 26 year old guy who likes being a businessman but went to medical school (Indians don�t need 4 years in a university first) to please his father. He and his wife live with his parents and siblings. His father owns a hotel and I gather the family is from an upper caste. A cousin who is single helps the young internet cafe owner with his business.

They ask me if I think things in their town are expensive and I reply that heavens no-for us westerners everything is very inexpensive. They say that some foreigners think everything here is too expensive. I ask who in the heck thinks this. They laugh and say emphatically “the Israelis.”

Then we talk about customs and the cousin says if he falls in love with a girl outside of his caste it would be impossible to marry her. Similarly, later around the corner we talk to a guy on a motorcyle who is on his way to visit his girlfriend of five years who he sadly can’t marry because she is not of his caste. I put my hand over my heart in sympathy for him.