Delhi, Agra, Jaipur, Udaipur, Jodhpur and Kate!

Hello all!

Plenty has happened since my last post, not sure I am going to be able to get it all in. But i will try and write this the best I can whenever I have time over the next few days. (So far I’ve been trying to do this for about 7 days….)

So Delhi turned out to be much crazier than Mumbai. Pahar Ganj was a heady mixture of sweat, sewage and spices, definitely not a place where you could expect to get any time to yourself! Having said all of that I had no problems at all with anyone, apart from the rickshaw drivers who kept trying to run me over but hey you can’t expect everything right? Did a few monumenty and museumey type things for a couple of days while I adjusted to the pace a little bit and gaged what the city was about.

Kate arrived on the 15th, despite telling me that she would be here on the 14th, so I checked into the hotel that I’d booked, slightly better in class than the 400rps a night place that I was staying in before…..it had a shower! Was actually quite nice to have a real bed with sheets and air con! Picked her up at the airport the next day which all went according to plan. I did think she might have died of shock on the drive back from the airport, traffic in Delhi is not something that you want to mess about with, lord knows how no one hits each other but so far that is exactly what they manage to do There were a few sharp intakes of breath from Kate throughout the journey though.

The first day in Delhi with Kate (well the only day as she turned up a day ‘late) was spent visiting the Ghandi Smitri, place where Ghandi was assassinated. It was as you can probably imagine quite poignant and peaceful. The rooms where he spent his last 100 days were displayed as well as his glasses and sandels, all that kind of thing. There was however, the strangest exhibition upstairs. If you can imagine then it was like the Tate Modern Meets Ghandi. Loads of strange interactive displays and exhibits that quite frankly made me leave after about 10 minutes. After retreating to the air-conditioned oasis that was TGI Fridays….what’s that, curry in India? I’ve never heard such a preposterous idea….we had an early night as there was a 6.15am train the next day to Agra.

We made it to Agra with no problems, except almost being conned into having our ticket ‘checked’ as it was an e-ticket. Not being on the top of my game at that time of the morning (no time for coffee), the guy who had been standing next to the security guards got us as far as the road outside and the various dodgy travel agents before I realised what was going on, but common sense managed to strike me and we went back to the station. Agra, as I am sure you all well know is the home of the Taj Mahal. What it is not home to however is a clean, unpolluted, nice smelling atmosphere. My god the place stinks. Garbage all around the streets, semi-open sewers, cow shit everywhere and the like. Ok, so we were not staying in the nicest part, budget and all that, but even so. The hotel anyway was ok, although it was about 40C and we had no air-con, the room was essentially a hot box, not something that made adjusting to the heat any easier for Kate. It did have stunning views of the Taj from the rooftop though, the best in town so I had heard. Amazing to see the sun go down and the color of the building change, eventually becoming a dark silhouette on the star lit sky. The first day was spent visiting Akbar’s Mausoleum and Agra Fort, both very cool in their own way. Some of the structures that are in this country acting as tombs or symbols of love are just insane when you see them in the flesh, so bloody big! Oh and we popped into the Oberoi hotel for a drink and lunch, I don’t think that opulent is quite the word I am looking for! Stupidly expensive lunch by Indian standards for what was very average food, the way they drowned the salad in dressing reminded me of LS6 in Leeds. The below picture is the view we had from the roof of the hotel:

The next day we got up to get to the Taj for 6am, the quietest and coolest part of the day, it was at least 40C in Agra. Despite appearences in photos and what not it really does seem quite ‘small’ in real life (the water in front especially), small but absolutely perfectly formed. It is truly stunning and set in some lovely grounds. Oh I forgot to mention that Kate was ill the day we went, a bit of a reaction to the heat, tiredness and food I think and she managed to be sick ON THE Taj….ok, not quite on the Taj, just outside of it, but still I think I should be allowed a bit of creative license here and there!

We decided that there was no point in staying in Agra for the extra night we had booked, especially in the sauna like room, so we hopped on a bus to Jaipur. Very grateful to Ramu at the bus stop who was a world of knowledge about decent places to stay and about cities in general. He sorted out a hotel for us as our original booking didn’t start until the day after and the place was lovely. Having Kate around is actually working out quite well, all these ‘luxury’ establishments that we are staying in! Well at least they have a shower.

Jaipur is a great place, we were staying just outside the centre, so away from the main hustle and bustle but only a short auto-rickshaw ride away. Beautiful sand stone havelis within the old town and the atmosphere of one big market place. The palace in the city was suitably opulent but perhaps the best thing and certainly the most revealing was the huge outdoor observatory dating from the late 1700s. Massive architectural instruments of astronomy were used to calculate the position of the heavenly bodies, it also boasts what is considered to be the worlds largest sundial that when read accurately, can be used to tell the time to an accuracy of about 2 seconds in local time. Many of the instruments have naturally been refurbished, a process that is still going on. The monkey temple, dedicated to the sun god afforded fantastic views over the city and an interesting walk up thanks to the hundreds of monkeys that were knocking around. All very friendly…except when they realised that you are carrying a bag of peanuts in your pocket and they decide that they would like said peanuts! We also visited the Amber Palace/Fort just outside of the city. An amazing building which for once had an equally good audio tour to explain it all for you. The style in which the rulers of the various parts of India used to live is quality, it makes an old English country house look like something out of Shameless. The use of gold, mirror, jewels, fabric and the like just seem to come together somehow. There was one room covered with thousands of tiny mirrors, that, when dark can be entirely lit by a single candle and the resulting reflections from the mirrors. The driver we had hired for 2 days usually works for businessmen coming over to Jaipur to buy jewels and what not (Jaipur is the centre of the jewel trade in India). He took us to a shop that allowed us to see where they actually cut and polish the rough stones from which the final article is then made, very interesting. It was good dose of reality however when we realised one of the workers must have been no more than 11 years old and was on a shift rotation, the small workshop was running 24 hours a day.

I’m wary of babbling and trying to cram in too much detail, but hopefully this is working out as some kind of outline from which you can imagine what we have been doing!

Oh before we leave Jaipur, we visited potentially the most amazing jewelery shop I have ever seen. No windows, just a security guard and a big door. Once the code had been entered to get in, all the lights came on and all you could see were masses of glittering stones and pieces of gold and silver. Much of the jewelerry of obviously based on Indian taste, much to big and heavy to wear in the UK but some of the detail just blew you away. Not to mention the size of the rubys, emeralds and diamonds that were on display! I quickly removed Kate from the shop and set upon the slightly less exilerating task of finding a shop that would sell me some decent boxer shorts.

Then we come a slight mistake. Somewhere, personally I blame it on Kate, I had managed to gain a day, i.e. I thought it was the 19th when actually it was the 20th. Now that would not usually be much of a problem except for the fact that I had booked first class overnight tickets on the train from Jaipur to Udaipur for the 19th and had reservations at a 4 bedroom colonial house in the countryside for the 20th and 21st. About 6pm I checked my email and found one from the guys who ran the house asking me why I hadn’t arrived at the train station as their driver had been waiting for 3 hours earlier in the day. Naturally this was all a bit of a shock and upon checking the dates and the train tickets I realised that I had made a slight boo boo. Cutting a long and painfully frustrating process short, I had to cut my losses and buy some rather expensive plane tickets to Udaipur for the next day and hope that the people at Devra would be kind enough to allow us to move the reservation back a day. That they were, with no extra charge and the place was amazing. Again, I won’t bore you with the details (or more of them), but the hosue was brilliant. Placed on a hill overlooking the lake and the lake palace in the distance, the rooms were massive, food great and the whole place had a feeling of calm. It helped that we were the only people there and had the best room as well! Being in somewhere so nice, not to mention someones house, did not stop Kate from putting her foot through one of the wooden sun beds and breaking one of the slights clean in half though….can’t take that girl anywhere.

Udaipur is definitely my favourite place so far in India, maybe favourite is not quite the word as it is much calmer, quieter and less polluted than many places but it really is beautiful. The City Palace is stunning inside and would be even if it wasn’t for the crystal gallery. This gallery contained such items as a crystal bed, crystal tables, crystal chairs, crystal pipes, crystal plates and well, more crystal. It was ordered from England many years ago by one of the rulers, unfortunately he died (at 25) before any of it arrived and it laid packed up in boxes for tens of years before being unpacked and displayed here. The largest collection in the world apparently and you can understand the claim.

The Lake Palace, now a luxury hotel that costs about $600 a night in a room that doesn’t even have a lake view (quite an achievement for a hotel that is situated IN a lake), is suitably pretty. We didn’t get a chance to go over, the only way is either to book for dinner (about 40 quid a head for a buffet) or to have a room, neither of which were within our limited financial reach. We did manage to see the 1934 Rolls Royce that was used in the Bond film Octopussy though, much of the filming was done in Udaipur, so that was quite cool.

From Udaipur we flew to Jodpur and the contrast could not have been more stark. Streets so narrow that some Americans could probably not walk down them, crammed with cows, scooters, auto-rickshaws and market stalls. Not to mention garbage of every type and some very pleasant open sewers. There really is not much to tell about our couple of nights there. We went to see Merengagh (spelling?) fort before we left which was great, but apart from that we spent all our time trying to figure out where to go next as I haven’t really sorted anything out. As such we ended up in Pushkar today, backtracking a bit but a destination in its own right. I will explain all aboyut Pushkar next time as my fingers are hurting and I need to go and check if Kate is awake for dinner yet!

Sorry about the length of time between this and my last post but I’ve been rather busy! I will try better in the following days and weeks.

If you had made it this far, first of all congratulations and second of all you will be pleased to know there are now about 100-150 photos of India now up on Flickr. I haven’t labelled them yet, but they are there! Mumbai, Delhi, Agra, Jaipur, Jodpur and Udaipur all present and correct.

Ciao xx