INDIA
What a country, it was truely like visiting Mars, everything is so different compared to the rest of the world! But we couldn't tour Asia, or even tour the world, without seeing India! This massive subcontinent devoured 9 weeks of our time on the trip, the longest time we'll spend in any one country. However, we did take a short break of 10 days in the Maldives.
A word of warning. We saw and did so many wonderful things that we had a difficult time capturing it all on our website. It was so hard to decide which of the many wonderful pictures to post, and the text for each page is quite long. So grab a cup of coffee, sit back, surf on, and share our captivating experience through India.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
India wears calluses on your soul. So much bestial poverty,
so much routine destitution, and those lucky enough to escape
misery often escape only by the margin of a single meal. India
makes you into a hard, cynical person, and if you're already
hard and cynical it makes you even more so. You find yourself
shoving aside six-year-old beggars because they don't look quite
wretched enough to deserve your spare change. Soon--very soon--you
no longer feel any shame for your hardness.
Consciously, or unconsciously, you formulate rules for your altruism.
I, for my part, always gave money to lepers, and seldom to anyone
else. A person with four sound limbs and two good eyes (my reasoning
went) has no business begging. But when charity is doled out
by formulas and calculations, it is no longer true charity. It
is mere accountancy."
taken from Jonah Blank's ARROW OF THE BLUE-SKINNED GOD
Our Arrival in
Dehli!
Rajasthan Part I
India,
Nov 2, 2000 thru Nov 11, 2000. Written by Laura
Before we got to India, I have to admit, I knew next to nothing about Indian culture, history, religion, and politics. Traveling through the seven specific states we did, and reading books about various Indian topics, we both learned a great deal.
Anxious as ever, we arrived very early on Monday, Nov 2nd in the Delhi airport from Katmandu, in fear for our lives due to other travelers' stories & guide book stories of garbage, beggars and touts. Needless to say, we were very pleasantly surprised. All went smoothly at the airport and even the taxi driver didn't fight us on taking us to the hotel of our choice. It helped that we arrived so early, and that there were no large international flights arriving at the same time, the airport was dead. It also helped that we were expecting the apocalypse, and got only Delhi. The heat and humidity hit us straight away, we had been in cool, dry Nepal for a month. Even though this is winter, which means non-equatorial people can survive, its sticky and uncomfortable, but not so bad that one needs A/C, at least not until we got to the south, closer to the equator. The thing we found most surprising was the cows sitting around the streets and corners of Delhi. Just amazing. People just accept the fact they've got to swerve to miss them on the freeway, shoo them away from their street-vendor food carts, and honk at them when they are in the way of backing up or turning their cars, scooters and bikes. It was definitely something to adjust to.
We went directly to a hotel recommended by the Lonely Planet as having very helpful owners, and we were very glad we did. We ended up renting a car with driver for our tour of Rajasthan for a great price, and we met Culdive, the friendliest driver in India, so we really lucked out.
Through our tour we learned about the unique history of Rajasthan, a mostly dessert and barren area. Only until it joined India in the 1940's was it a single state. Starting from about 1000 AD there were various warrior clans called the Rajputs who had their own kingdoms, much like mid-evil Europe, and each had their own king (the maharaja), palace and fort, all of which now make fantastic tourist destinations. The maharaja have had a hard time transitioning into the 21st century, and in order to cope, many have turned their palaces into exclusive hotels (two of which we stayed in!) or into a tourist attraction. Everything here is colorful, the people and their camels and handcrafts. Their state bird is the peacock, which is brilliantly pictured everywhere. The amount of beautiful things to buy here was unlimited, beautiful mirror work bedcovers, colorful hand embroidery, local miniature paintings, and on and on. Needless to say, we've decided to turn our bedroom at home into a maharaja palace and bought some items to decorate with! And we were lucky enough that our visit coincided with the Camel Fair in Pushkar
Our first stop was Jaipur, the capital of Rajasthan. Many cities in Rajasthan have sort of a theme color, Jaipur's is pink, well more of a terra-cotta really. It was painted pink in 1876 to welcome King Edward the 7th on a visit. So we visited parts of the pink old city center from the 1700's. Best was the city palace, with its grand display of the maharaja clothing. So grand! We also visited the two forts overlooking the city, which were nice, but best in Jaipur was the Amber fort (the palace inside the fort). Our driver got us there before the 100's of tourist coaches, and we got to meander around its many intricate hallways, stunning rooms, and inner courtyards complete with ornate garden, pond, and waterfalls. Its here that we fell in love with Rajput architecture. Decorating with colored mirrors on the walls and ceilings is very big in these palaces, and the maharaja's bedroom was no exception. At one point an Indian tourist called us over to join him in the small bedroom, the guide shut the doors and windows so the rooms was pitch black and then he lit a candle and waved in it the air. The hundreds of mirrors lit up and it seemed as though there were a thousand stars shinning around the room, unforgettable! Jaipur is where I caught my Indian cold (everyone seemed to be sick around me) which lasted a good 10 days. So after staying an extra day to rest in Jaipur, we moved onto Pushkar for the annual camel fair.
Pushkar is home to the largest camel faire in the world and we were lucky enough to be in the area when it happened. Pushkar is a small & very important pilgrimage town that booms during this fair. All the breeders and owners come to trade camels (Lonely Planet says an average of 50,000 camels) and the religious pilgrims come to worship at the same time for an important religious celebration (Lonely Planet says an average of 200,000 visitors). Needless to say, the small town gets so packed you can't walk down the street, so we arrived a few days before the fair actually started in order to see the height camel trading going on, and travel film making, we saw two groups filming and many professional photographers. It was amazing, the dessert hills were black with camels. Throughout Rajasthan, we saw camels being using to transport many things including huge slabs of marble, they mixed right into the traffic on the roads. I had no idea that camels were still a part of so many people's daily lives. We also took at short 1 hour camel ride to see what it was like and whether we could handle our planned 4-day camel trek in the dessert. We nearly were killed getting on & off the camel and later learned these fair camels are not keen to carrying tourists, unlike the trekking camels, and they show their displeasure by being very unruly. We also decided that carting tourists around during the fair is more for the locals than the tourists, as all the locals seemed to get a big kick out of seeing us up there and didn't hesitate to point at us and laugh. We were glad we could oblige.
Pushkar is also home to the only Brahma temple in India, so we got a chance to visit along with all the other Indian tourists and pilgrims. A side note. If you read any guidebook to India there's a large and detailed health section listing all the many wonderful and exotic diseases and parasites you can catch while visiting, some of which can burrow through the skin on the bottoms of your feet and begin their journey inside your body looking for places to colonize. The books also promote all the beautiful temples there are to visit, and inform you that you must remove your shoes and enter into the temple barefoot. What they neglect to mention is how extremely dirty is it inside these temples. There's garbage, human waste, monkey waste, goat waste, rotting food offerings and puddles you must walk through which mix all these things together. Yuck! We just tried not to think about it. I figure I'll offer myself to the Center of Disease Control when I'm back to be tested for any new exotic diseases.
After a two days we then headed to what became our second favorite city, Udaipur. It's a very romantic fort city, with many beautiful palaces and lakes to visit. The palaces used for sets in the James Bond movie, Octopussy, are here, and of course I had to visit them all as I love James Bond movies! The city palace was so amazing we went through it twice, once with our guide and then again on our own to really take it all in. We also visited the Crystal Gallery at the Fateh Prakash Palace Hotel and saw a crystal bed, chairs, sofas, tables, it just went on and on. Then the crème de la crème, we stayed at the Lake Palace Hotel, one of the world's most spectacular hotels, we just couldn't pass it up. We only got a room because our driver knew one of the managers, and it was worth every penny. Its set out in the middle of a lake and overlooks the fortress and palaces in Udaipur. It was originally one of the summer palaces of the maharaja. The president of the World Bank stayed there the night we did, we saw his welcome reception and banquet. We ate fantastic meals sitting next to the lake, lounged in the sun sitting in beautiful turreted window seats, and took a dip in the pool. I ate a fresh strawberry tart and my eyes started to tear because it reminded me of home so much, I hadn't had strawberries since we left CA and yes, we were starting to get homesick. There we met a wonderful Australian couple in their 70's who were on a palace tour of Rajasthan. They go from palace hotel to palace hotel in their air conditioned car with driver and pick up a guide in each city to show them all the sites. Not a bad idea!
Aaron inside Jaipur's Amber Fort
The beautifuly carved lattice marble windows in the Amber Fort
Laura's favorite mirrored gateway in the Amber Fort. Peacocks are the state bird of Rajasthan.
Camels as far as the eye could see in the deserts of Pushkar
Aaron is with his favorite god, Hanuman the monkey god, in Pushkar.
(Skip to the next set of pictures for India)
I'm ready to read more,
onto Rajasthan Part II