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Mount Abu

Thursday, January 31st, 2008

I was standing at the bus stop in udaipur for about 20 minutes before anyone had turned up. Initially I just ordered a chai from the guys along the road, before throwing on the recently acquired warm clothes, sitting down and waiting for the bloody thing to arrive. The first person to turn up was this dude from Belgium called Jonas. I was not messing before when I said that this guy was marks doppleganger – I seriously had to do a double take, freaky stuff. The street hawker had given me two cups of chai as he had no change for a 10 rupee note – was probably just a sneaky way to get me to purchase two cups of the sweet sweet drink. I didn’t mind as it gave me a kind of offering that I could give to jonas to get talking and pretty much have someone to talk to on the way to mount abu.

While travelling meeting someone like this is a really good way to save money, you get a chance to make sure that the person neither is insane or inane and if they are not you can share costs such as taxis, meals and accomodation. The trip to mount abu was a reasonable 6 hour journey. The last 2 hours were spent negotiating hairpins as the road weaved its way up into the mountains. The town itself stands at 1400 metres while the surrounding hills and mountains dwarf this by at least another 300 metres. The town is one of the most popular holiday/honeymoon destinations for indians themselves, its incredibly picturesque and gives a kind of volcanic impression with a small lake in the middle of the town surrounded by steep rising hills which then quickly fall into the greater rajasthani valley. Almost every building was a hotel so most people there were tourists of some description. It was also the first place I have been in this country which actually had ecological processes in place such as no plastic allowed, there was waste management, many hotels ran off solar power and shock horror there were even some rubbish bins along the side of the road.

The hotel we stayed in was called the Shri Ganesh. A typically indian name but also the last place you would ever to expect to see a massive poster of Fermanagh sitting ontop of the front door, which is exactly what greeted me. This immediately gave me something to relate to the people there. It was a family run guesthouse, the only member of the family not working there was over working in belfast – hence the connection. It turned out that the mother and father had gone over last year to visit him. While the father seemed to like ireland when I asked the mother if she like it she just replied with a flat ‘No’, no explanation was forthcoming so I left her at it.

As you can probably guess, mt abu is made for trekking, climbing and lots of hill walking. It might come as a bit of a shock to some people who know me but I actually really love bombing around the place be it in wicklow in glendalough, the aran islands or even just back at home at lough sheelin. The hotel ran guided tours from 8 in the morning but I never got up in time for those. Instead I decided to tackle the peaks by myself. Yes it is a little nuts to go off walking in a place thats not only unfamiliar but is also home to many wild bears, tigers and the odd crocodile – what could possibly go wrong. Given the cup like shape of the area you never lost sight of the town so finding your bearings was never a problem. I made my way towards a temple that was marked on the map which was at a reasonable height – when I got there I really had a thirst for more. I climbed up the rocks, through the thickest bush I have ever come across having to cover several yards on my stomach at times attempting to make it to the highest point I could see which was marked with a red flag, at one stage I went to look up to check my route only to be met full on the top off the head with a bloody cactus, took blood n all – to sound all macho and hard I will not say that it was just a scratch and that it could well have been the strong sun in my eyes that made me see red on my fingers, but I think it should be left at – yeah the blood was gushing out of my head, I am hard, me!!! Reaching the top of the mountain was a great feeling, the view was panoramic to beat the band. You could see the town surrounding the lovely green lake, at the same height around you could see many different local peaks in the the distance you could see all 1400 metres down to the rajasthani valley which given that its in dusty old india was fairly well shrouded in a thick smog. Looking through a pair of sunglasses you could see the thickness of the polution that envelopes this country – even at the height I was at you could see it reacher higher still. I have heard that the only place that you can go to in the country to get away from it is the mighty himalayas, as it only disperses fully at 3000 metres or so.

On my way back down from my little adventure I had to ask for the help of a local farmer boy who guided me back onto the right path that led back to the village. After giving the lad a few rupees (he asked for 7 which was an unusual number, sounded almost like a rate – he got 10), I trotted back down towards the town. On my way I came across a most wonderful sight, for a few minutes I could hear kids singing but could not see them. Eventually I turned a corner to find about 20 5-14 year old kids in a tiny school, practising a play thru hindi under the guidance of their teacher. Now when I say school, this place was one metal sheet propped up by 4 rusty posts to act as nothing more than shelter from rain or sun. They had just one blackboard but no pens or paper to write with. The teacher saw me standing and taking this all in so he invited me and explained about how the kids were poor and couldn’t afford to go to a proper school, he explained the lesson he was giving and told me about their ages and other small info like that. I told him that my own father was a teacher and would love to have seen such a phenomenon – kids actually wanting to be in school and wanting to learn!! I took a photo of them all and its one I will defo keep for the scrapbook – if yer lucky I might even throw it up here.

Sunset is a big event here and is the culmunation of most day trippers days before they board the buses back to whereever they came from. There is even a site in town dedicated to the sunset, set up for the travelling hoards. On the side of the mountain they have constructed a fully functional terrace which wouldn’t look out of place on the town side of breffni park – when I was there at least a couple of hundred people stood and cheered, chanted while the sun took its daily dip into the horizon. It was incredibly surreal. I have pictures and I promise I will get them up on this page within the next week.

I stayed for 3 nights in mount abu – its a really enjoyable escape from the craziness that went before and the madness that was to come. Jonas headed on towards jaipur which was due east – unfortunately I was headed due west – onto jodhpur. I met a lovely if a little crazy australian girl called Shari in the hotel who on her summer holidays from college was on a 2 month trip around the sub continent. For the next week or so our plans were pretty much identical so off we headed west into the thar desert.

thanks for all the comments, keep them coming!!!

Phil

Udaipur

Tuesday, January 22nd, 2008

Udaipur is a beautiful city. Most of the town is painted white or at least whitewashed. In the middle of the town there is a semi artificial lake which in turn has a very fancy hotel and a palace in the middle of it. The surrounding countryside is a mixture of bony hills and desert wasteland, it really has an Arabian feel to the place. The place where I was staying had this amazing rooftop restaurant which had a nice view over the lake, for the first couple of hours I just sat there and took in the city and the surrounding countryside. The owner of the place immediately set about selling us some local tours to places of interest – I was waaay too tired to contemplate anything stressful after the epic journey from chennai but one place did trigger an interest, Chumblegarh which is a massive fort 84 km north of udaipur. Myself and mal booked a driver to get us up there the following day so we could take it reasonably handy on our first day.

After a while we set out to explore the town itself. Right in the middle there is a jain temple which was okay but nothing too memorable, beside it was the Maharashtra’s palace which was fantastic, if a little crowded. We spent a few hours just wandering around this huge building which had some wonderful views over the city – taking pictures required an expensive fee which being a cavan man was never going to happen but I managed to sneak one or two including one in a room which is designed to look like a hall of mirrors but in fact was just a load of identical rooms joined together, a bit head wrecking at first esp when you are wondering why you cannot see your reflection…

We had an early start the next day so after swallowing a few beers with some aussie guys we met along the way it was off to bed. The drive up to the fort was horrible. The beer here contains glycerol which is a preservative with the added side effect of giving you horrible headaches, on top of that idiot boy decided to skip breakfast in order to get a few more minutes in bed and compounds the misery by taking his malaria medication which as an antibiotic taken on an empty stomach gives you woeful heartburn and nausea. You can imagine what the roads were like… We made it up there after about 2 hours. I had to just sit down for 10 minutes in the car park to get myself together before entering the fort.

The fort itself was amazing. The main structure alone would’ve been worth the trip – perched over a thousand metres up it had wondrous 360 degree views over the local landscape. Surrounding this was a 35km heavily fortified wall giving it massive grounds. There are also 350 individual temples in the complex aswell as a village and individual dwellings that are scattered here and there. These farmer dwellings are very simple very small mud huts with a straw rooftop. The best thing about this place was the lack of tourists, it gets about 100 per day which for the size of it is nothing. The sense of abandonment, kinda like you are after discovering the place yourself. We spent 3-4 hours in this place, you could easily spend more.
On the way back to udaipur we called into another jain temple which was lovely in itself but the fort was too hard an act to follow.

The following day was an easy day for me, mal my aussie travelling companion was heading off to Bikaner in northern rajasthan, I didn’t go because I have more time and there are things between here and there that i want to see. In udaipur it is alot colder than down south, esp after sunset when the temperatures plummet to freezing point. I hadn’t expected this temperature drop so I was freezing my nuts off the first day or two. On this third day I made it my sole mission to buy some decent winter gear. Down to the tibetan market in town (reckoned they should know about chilly weather) where I picked up a granddad cardigan, the dodgiest badaclava every, I commissioned a tailor to make me a jumper out of the thickest material he had in his shop and to top it all off I bought this big granny shawl. In euros this all came to approximately 10 euros. Bargain!!! though the flip side of that is that when fully kitted out I look like I could join the mujahadeen.

I went to a dance performance that night with some kiwi girls i met in the hotel. After the episode in Kerala I was incredibly wary but I was reassured that it was only an hour long so if it was crap I wouldn’t have to endure it that long. It was far from crap though, all the performers were very talented, the spinning, the dancing, one woman balanced 10 pots on her head which in itself is incredibly impressive as the pots together were much taller than herself but on top off that off she goes to do a jig on a carpet covered in broken glass – I mean how do you learn that you can do that?

My last day in udaipur before heading for some trekking in mount abu I took a trip to the monsoon palace which along with the palace on the lake played prominent roles in Octopussy. The monsoon palace was the residence of the baddie and also where roger moore stayed while the palace on the lake was where octopussy and her troop of beautiful but deadly assassins lived – of course I don’t remember this from waay back when I watched it years back – every restaurant in this town showed the film at least once a day – invariably if you walked the streets at around 7 in the evening you would hear the chimes off the bond theme tune, made it all very surreal at times… Back to the monsoon palace, its an 8km walk out of town, the last 3km are along a winding almost vertical road so with the heat it took the guts of 3 hours to make it. Needless to say the view from up top was phenomenal, I would’ve loved to stay for sunset but I don’t like walking out in the desert on my own after nightfall – who knows what might be lurking. Back in town there was a Muslim festival commemorating the death of Mohammed’s nephew in some great battle years back – they run through the streets beating knives off their chest, sometimes drawing blood. Its quite extreme to say the least, I was hanging out with the kiwi girls at this stage and they found this unsettling as there were mobs marauding through the streets and they had heard that some western girls had gotten groped or worse on such occasions before. So we headed out of town for dinner to a place which had a beautiful view of the city at night. The food was amazing there aswell, cashew nut curry. Beautiful!!!

I left udaipur the next morning for mount abu – 6 hour bus, yipee. Though I did get to spend it with this belgian dude called Jonas who no messing is Mark Gaffney. Wait till you see the photos, its freaking me out!!!

later,
Phil

The Trip Up North – Ajanta Caves

Monday, January 21st, 2008
Feeling fully recovered from the little bug that I had picked up I decided that it was time to make the big move up to the north of the country. I had had enough of temples and beaches for the ... [Continue reading this entry]

Mamallapuram

Friday, January 18th, 2008
Try and say that five times, try and remember how to pronounce it so you know when to jump off a chennai bound bus - I had a little difficulty executing this last simple task and ended up having to ... [Continue reading this entry]

Pondicherry

Thursday, January 17th, 2008
There is definitely more than one way to skin a cat in this country. Yesterday when I arrived in tanjore I made it my business to find out when the bus to pondicherry left, the guy told me 3.30 and ... [Continue reading this entry]

Tanjore

Thursday, January 10th, 2008
Tanjore was but a short hop up the road from trichy. It is however a goodbit off the beaten track and doesn't attract that many western travellers, infact no where I have been since Varkala have I seen more than ... [Continue reading this entry]

Trichy

Thursday, January 10th, 2008
I left madurai on the second of january, grabbed a public bus (yes one of those buses) to a town called trichy which is about 120 km north of madurai. I had the option of going to a place called ... [Continue reading this entry]

Madurai

Wednesday, January 9th, 2008
I arrived into madurai after dark, as I said before its a bad time to arrive anywhere especially when you need to find yourself somewhere to stay and something to eat. Madurai is a big town, the second biggest in ... [Continue reading this entry]

Fort Cochin

Thursday, January 3rd, 2008
Right - this entry is from a couple of weeks ago. I'm sure it shouldn't distress you too much to think back that far. As I mentioned before we arrived late into fort cochin. The journey from the bus stop ... [Continue reading this entry]