The India Chronicles 2000-2001

Hi again, time to update everyone again as we travel through Rajasthan.

Saturday, Nov 18 we had reserved seats on one of the private buses from Agra to Jaipur. The restaurant owner where bus patrons wait asked where we intended to stay in Jaipur. We had a recommendation for Hotel Diggi Palace, which just happened to be his friend's place. He offered to phone & make a reservation for us, free of charge, and to make sure we were met at the bus terminal in Jaipur. He said Jaipur had a reputation for very aggressive rickshaw drivers, so we took him up on the offer.

Private buses may have slightly more comfortable seats but the almost complete lack of interior upkeep is the same as the public buses. The seat in front of Ray was in a permanent back position, but luckily, still left room for Ray. The topography was the same flat farm land, but the interesting part of the trip was watching the activities along the way. There were herds of goats and sheep and as we got nearer to Jaipur, there were camels tied up in the farmyards and herds of camels sauntering along with their keepers. Fields were even being plowed with camels pulling a simple one pronged wooden plow. Small mud storage huts, decorated on all sides with intricate designs etched into the mud stood in many farm yards. Piles of dung patties were being shaped and dried in the sun, then piled like coils of rope in the farmyards. Closer to Jaipur, the landscape included several barren ridges, most of which had a fort of some sort on top & often were surrounded by long crenulated walls. Rajasthan was a collection of Rajputs, or kingdoms, that were continually at war amongst themselves and foreign invaders, hence the number of fortifications.

We arrived in Jaipur safe and sound and the man in Agra was true to his word. A driver, Fariq, was waiting with our name on a sign and we escaped the frantic pleas of the other drivers. The hotel is an old mansion converted into accommodations for budget travelers like us. It is on a quiet dead end street near to everything and has a nice large garden to relax in. The only negative was the beds and pillows. They were the hardest we have had so far! In the garden waving to us was a Swiss/French couple we had met several times on our journey. They had been staying there for several days enjoying the sights of Jaipur, but had delayed their departure while the woman recovered from Delhi Belly. We told them we had been fine. Famous last words. I guess we were just a little too smug about staying healthy. That night we went to a recommended restaurant that even had tablecloths on the tables, a step up for us. We had one of our favourite meals, Thalis, which gives you a taste of several varieties of foods and comes with rice and chapatis, and can vary from region to region. Our meal came faster than usual, which may have been a clue something was not fresh enough. Ray was up all night suffering from Delhi Belly and the next day he just rested and recuperated. I was fine.

I spent the morning visiting two museums. The first, the Museum of Indology is the private collection of one man and is housed in his private residence. The collector is now dead and they plan to move to a proper building, when the monies are raised, so that more than 10% can be displayed. The admission price included a guide who turned on the lights in each room, explained each piece, and turned off the lights as we left. There was everything from fossils, rocks, stamps, old money, fabrics, a painting on a grain of rice, to you name it.

From there I walked several blocks to the Central Museum. Despite being warned about the number of people around all hoping to get part of the tourist pie, I didn't have any problems, but there are the usual number of people living on the side of the main streets. I still get a kick out of the reality of cows and goats wandering the streets of 2,000,000 plus cities and the number of carts driven by donkeys, bullocks and camels. This was another eclectic collection, housed in Albert Hall, a rather grand building surrounded by boulevards & parks. This was a popular spot for locals on a Sunday outing with their families. I enjoyed the dioramas of tribal costumes, paintings, decorative arts and models of Sadhus (holy men) in various positions designed to make their life on earth difficult and entry to heaven more assured.

On the way home I stopped for some of the local Lassi, a curd drink served in a disposable clay cup. I also bought a cheese turnover in a bake shop for my lunch. I got Ray up for a short while in the afternoon, and insisted he try a little soup for supper in the hotel restaurant. I don't know what it was I ate during the day, but I started to get feverish & feel awful right after supper and spent the whole night with my version of Delhi Belly. Ugh. The next day was my turn to be a write off, but Ray was somewhat improved.

By Tuesday I was well enough to tour the city & environs with Fariq in his rickshaw. We stopped first at the Royal Gaitors, which are cenotaphs for the members of the Jaipur Royal family, built over the past 300 years. It seems royalty like to leave at least one monument to themselves.

From there we drove to Amber Fort, constructed in 1592 as the ancient capital of Jaipur state. There were lots of tour buses & tourists around, but the place is large enough to absorb them once they are inside. This fort-palace is reached by a long ramp up which ride tourists atop gaily decorated elephants. We walked the short distance to the main gate. The fort was the usual series of courtyards within courtyards and corridors everywhere leading to stairs and upper terraces, great for views of the surrounding countryside.

After a short lunch, Fariq took us to several factories making some of Jaipur's specialties. Our Swiss/French friends had told us to expect being brought to shops, but it was very interesting. At the first, a carpet factory, we watched several men weaving a carpet in a more intricate design than the Nepali ones. They were also washing, stretching and doing some serious trimming on carpets on site. Then we were shown their variety of carpets in their shop. They were gorgeous; some wool, some silk and my favourite, made of camel wool in unique tribal designs. We were almost tempted, except that it would have meant a redecoration of our house, which we are not prepared to do. The next stop was a Gem Factory, part of a family compound, where they cut the rough stones, hand polish them and also do the settings. Ray was in a very generous mood and decided to buy me my Christmas present, a pair of sapphire studs. We had a short tour of a textile factory where they do hand block printing of cotton and silk, but I am saving textiles for Jaisalmer.

Then it was time to return to the old city of Jaipur and tour the City Palace. I think we were both getting tired or we were tired of displays of textiles and armaments. The last stop of the day was more interesting. Right across the street from the City Palace is the Jantar Mantar, which at first glance looks like a series of Soviet designed stairways to nowhere. They are really giant instruments, built in 1728 of stone and marble, to satisfy the Maharaja's obsession with astronomy and astrology. Apparently he spent much of his time there making calibrations and calculations.

That night after supper at the hotel, we agreed to view a portfolio of miniature paintings displayed by one of the employees, and painted by his brother. This is another specialty of Jaipur. Usually they depict Hindu myths or elephants or camels is decorative regalia. They weren't very expensive, considering the work involved, so we bought a few as souvenirs of Rajasthan.

The next morning we checked out of the hotel and hired a car and driver to tour part of the Shekhawati area and view the many Havelis. The car was an old, white Ambassador, the sturdy Indian taxi, and although we had expected Fariq, his replacement, Despat, was a pleasant young man and a careful driver. Havelis are highly decorated mansions built by merchants, rich through trade from caravans routes through this area between Jaipur, Delhi and Bikander. About 50 K out of Jaipur, we took a side road down the narrowest and worst pavement to date to visit Samode Palace, which is now a beautifully restored and maintained hotel. There are a few of our friends who would appreciate the beautiful gardens, pool and sumptuous rooms, priced from Rs 3000 - 5000 a night. Non-guests pay Rs 100 just to go inside, but get an interesting guided tour through several rooms and common areas that rival some of the other palaces we have visited.

We returned on that same narrow road and headed up the main highway to Nawalgarh, where we first stopped at a small guesthouse outside the town for a peaceful lunch. The owner of the Guesthouse was very disappointed that we were not going to stay with him and use his place as a base from which to tour. Instead, we toured the streets of Nawalgarh to see the decorations and frescoes painted on every wall both inside and outside the Havelis. Some are still occupied, and at least one is now a well preserved museum, but their owners were no longer wealthy merchants who could afford the upkeep on these large mansions. We drove on to a second town, Mandawa, where there is a hotel in part of an old Palace and several less well preserved Havelis. We had a good view of the town from the roof top terrace of the hotel and a short walk through town, but we had had enough and were glad to return to the car. Our journey was complete in Fatehpur, a small town on the main road to Bikaner, our next stop. We checked into our hotel and said good bye to our driver, as we planned to travel the rest of the way by public bus. I really think the bus is more comfortable than that Ambassador, or maybe it was those bad side roads.

The next morning we narrowly missed a travel disaster. After breakfast, the two kind managers of the hotel accompanied us out to the road to help us get on the right bus for Bikaner, as none of them have destination names in English. We no sooner piled on the bus and stowed our bags, than Ray started searching for his waist pouch and it was nowhere to be found. We had no option but to stop the bus and get off to return to the hotel. We flagged down a rickshaw full of locals and managed to communicate where we wanted to go. Luckily it was only a few K away and we were soon back where we started, much to the surprise of our hosts. Ray ran upstairs to our room, but we hadn't left it there. With that, I ran out to the road where we had waited for the bus and the Gods were with us. There was the waist pouch, unopened and intact, just where it must have fallen off when we were loading everything into the bus. Boy were we relieved. Our passports were elsewhere, but our Visa card that we had been using to replenish our money supply was in the pouch. That would have been a real pain to replace. Anyway, back to the road we went with our genial hosts, and we were finally on our way by 9:45, having only lost 1/2 hr. Ray said he was ready for a good scotch.

The landscape past Fatehpur changed from the flatlands we had observed before, to gently undulating desert dotted with mostly denuded, gnarly trees. The locals cut the green branches off to feed the goats, but the tree roots are deep enough that they catch the underground water and eventually sprout again. We passed several camel carts carrying goods and women dressed in brilliantly coloured costumes decorated with silver disks. Some of the houses looked like white washed adobes with blue trim and many of the villages were just collections of round mud huts roofed with straw. All this desert land was carefully plowed and cultivated and where irrigation sprinklers were working there were clusters of women seeding the fields by hand. We passed, wit h much care, several vehicles that looked like nothing more than huge cloth bags on wheels. Their loads, crowned with 3 or 4 workers, spread like a large belly almost the entire width of the road and reached within inches of the ground. These were trucks loaded with sacks of animal fodder and I don't know how they managed to stay upright.

We arrived in Bikander by 1 PM, took a rickshaw to our chosen Guesthouse, ate some lunch and took a small walk around the nearby bazaar at Kote Gate, an entrance to the old city. This is not a museum town, it is crowded with people and the small stalls and shops we find interesting. I would have loved to photograph some of the women dressed in red with ropes of silver jewelry draped over their heads and necks and weari ng bracelets of bone or silver from their wrists to their armpits. I even asked permission, but they were too shy, so I respected their wishes for now.

Friday, the cold I had been nursing for the past day or two was in full flow, but I decided the sunshine would do it good, so we walked over to the Junagarh Fort to join a tour. The admission price includes a guide, but the tour group was a mixed bag of Indians and Westerners of all languages and the guide gave most of his talk in Hindi.

The most arresting feature for me were the handprints of the wives who were about to commit Sati, which means they threw themselves on their husband's funeral pyre. Ray says he is almost over-forted. He has seen all the public meeting rooms and private meeting rooms and highly decorated palaces and museums of guns and knives he can handle for now.

It was time for a break and lunch and we found a very interesting mansion turned hotel and restaurant right next to the fort. The young owner of Bhairon Vilas was only to glad to show us several rooms he is restoring and furnishing with family heirlooms. The owner's grandfather, a cousin of the Bikander Maharaja, built the mansion more than 100 years ago and the current owner has great plans to improve the grounds and increase the number of rooms available. The cheapest room at Rs 500 was still impressive and wasn't too far out of our league. We lunched in peace and solitude under printed cotton canopies on the roof.

That afternoon, we explored further into the old city, ending up down a back alley and in the middle of a herd of cows, much to the amusement of the residents. We found out that this is a Muslim community who support themselves on the milk, but we found it strange to find a farm in the middle of the town. Further on, we passed several old Havelis, covered not in frescoes, but with intricately carved sandstone. Like the other towns, most of the buildings have seen better days, but they are still interesting.

We have been discussing the possibility of a Camel Safari and had talked to one tout already. On the way to supper that night, we met another salesman who had approached Ray that afternoon and given him his card. I recognized his name from the Lonely Planet, so I asked him and his companion for more details. His companion, who was Vinod Bhojak, the owner of the Safari operation (www.vinodesertsafari.com), insisted we come with him to his home where we could talk to two English fellows who had just returned from a 3 day Safari and were on their way to Jaipur on the night train. He promised his wife could provide us with supper, so off we went in a rickshaw to the far end of the old city. The fellows were still there, madly finishing supper, but we managed to find out from them what to expect on a safari. They said good bye and we ate supper and looked at his photos and read some of his testimonials. I wasn't sure if I was well enough to handle an overnight on the desert, but I seem to be much better, so we have decided to go with Vinod on Sunday. We passed up the 7 day expedition, which would have brought us almost all the way to Jaisalmer, and we decided the 2 day might be a rush, so we are signed up for a 3 day trip.

Today, Saturday, we are just taking it easy and I am finishing this episode. Stay tuned for the Great Camel Safari in the next letter.