Rajasthan
TODAY IS OUR 8 WEEK ANNIVERSARY IN INDIA! 15 WEEKS OF TRAVELING SINCE SEPTEMBER.
It’s been a week and a half since my last update. A lot can happen in a week and a half when you’re traveling in India.
From Bharatpur (the bird sanctuary), we went to Jaipur, the capital of Rajasthan. Rajasthan is quintessential India: men in colorful turbans riding by on camels,women bedeckeled in gold bangles, beautiful silk saris and henna painted hands, desert sunsets, sandstone forts and palaces. Jaipur is the modern city version of all of this; it’s noisy, glitzy and glamourous. It’s also a shopper’s paradise. We spent a few days shopping for cheap textiles (I finally found the long, flowy skirt I wanted), visiting the City Palace (where the family of the last Rajput still lives.) We also visited the Hawa Mahal (the Palace of Winds) which is solely a facade with intricately carved sandstone windows used by the ladies of the royal household to watch the happenings of the street below. We wandered around the markets, getting lost in the maze of textile shops. We visited an observatory (Jantar Mantar) which was built in 1728 by Jai Singh, the founder of Jaipur. We spent an hour or so with a small guide book playing amateur astronomers. We also made a day trip to Amber (a nearby village which was the original capital of Jaipur) to visit and old fort and palace.
Jaipur was also the most modern city (population 2 million) we had visited in India since Delhi. I had a real sense of the difference in the social classes here. On the main road near our guesthouse, you could find 5 star hotels, clothing shops selling European style clothes, expensive jewelry stores, movie theatres, shopping malls, expensive cars. You could also see a lot of people sleeping on the street, building small fires to keep warm and begging for money. It’s a different kind of poverty in the city that in the rural areas. It reminds me of the poverty we find in our own countries and in a way it’s more shocking that what you see in Bihar, where many villages don’t have electricity and people live solely off agriculture.
A few days in the “big city” was enough for us, and we left for Jaisalmer on an overnight “sleeper” bus. I had never seen a bus with double beds in my life before I came to India.
Jaisalmer is a pleasant little town in the Thar Desert. We arrived last Thursday to meet Josh and Marisa, and immediately set off on a two-day camel safari. My butt is still aching…but a little bit of suffering was worth the fantastic views in the desert. We passed through many different types of landscapes over the course of two days. The first day we started around 7:30 AM. Having slept on a bus the night before, Fab and I were not very enthusiastic about waking up so early, but traveling is not always so easy. We took a jeep to a village about 40km from Jaisalmer where we met our camels and our guides. We immediately mounted the camels and started walking in the desert. To our surprise, it was really cold. It reaches around 80F (30C) by mid-afternoon, but the mornings (and the nights) are cold. The desert is actually quite green, there is some farm (the guides told us it was “camel food”), there was also a type of wildflower and a small fruit that resembles a watermelon that the goats seem to like. After a couple of hours, we stopped for lunch and a siesta during the heat of the afternoon. Our guides made fresh chapati (Indian flatbread), desert weed with spicy sauce and daal (lentils) over an open fire. We relaxed, drank chai and talked until it was time to get back on the camels. We continued for a couple of hours (Fabien and I were always lagging behind as his camel stopped to snack on a tree ever 5 minutes) until we reached the sand dunes. The dunes were gorgeous and we spent the rest of the afternoon making shadow scenes in the sand, playing, trying to take the perfect photograph and then enjoying the beautiful sunset over the desert. Our guides once again cooked up a spicy and delicious meal over the campfire. We drank chai and rum and chatted until Marisa and Josh (who were a bit pressed for time) caught a jeep back to town. Fabien and I settled in for our night in the desert. Under 3 heavy blankets, we managed to keep warm. It was perfectly quiet accept for the occassional snorting and munching of the camels. We finally had a good night’s rest before waking up to see the sunrise in the desert. The next morning it was a little difficult to get back on the camel. My muscles were already a bit sore, but I convinced myself that the experience was worth the pain (it’s a little bit like the pep talk I gave myself half way through the marathon.) The landscapes were actually even more impressive the second day. We lunched near a small camp (where our guide’s brother was staying); he was tending sheep and doing some agriculture. He was staying in a small hut with a thatched roof completely open on one side. They had built a den for the baby sheep nearby. As we ate a lunch of home cooked food, our camels grazed on the small trees nearby. Around 5pm, we came to a spot where they would pick us up to take us back to town. I was quite happy to be on my own two feet again, but I was also a bit sad to leave the peace and solitude of the desert. My camel was happy to have another snack break and devoured half a tree while waiting on the side of the road.
Back in Jaisalmer, we discovered that there was a lot to see in addition to the camel trek. Our guesthouse was extremely charming. We stayed in the Desert Haveli. A “haveli” is a traditional, ornately decorated, residence in Rajasthan. In our case, the “haveli” was built into the walls of the Jaisalmer fort. Our room had sandstone walls, a reading nook with colorful cushions and pillows and a little wooden window that looked out over the city below, an intricately carved wooden bed with a local style bedcover. We also had a roof top restaurant that looked out over the fort. And we paid 6 euros per night. Sometimes you have to treat yourself well…The fort was full of souvenir hawkers, from wooden camels to silver bangles to tapestries decorated with glass. It was quite funny returning to our hotel, first through the gates of the fort then through this maze of shops. The town is so small that by the end of 3 days everyone knows who you are. There is also a small lake (yes, an oasis in the desert) and Fabien and I rented a paddle boat on Sunday afternoon to play on the lake.
We did all of the typical tourist things in Jaisalmer, we visited the Desert Cultural Museum, the palace, several havelis and the Jain temples. Of course we also visited a few souvenir shops. This time with a plan in mind. We are constantly searching for business ideas, and we’re now seriously considering importing. We visited a wholesale shop in Jaisalmer that deals mainly in silk bedcovers, cushion covers and locally made tapestries. We got a good lesson in judging the quality of this work. They spent a good amount of time showing us the different samples of work and explaining how it is made. Amazingly, most of this stuff is handmade by village people. We picked up a couple of samples (and souvenirs.)
This morning we left Jaisalmer. We took a bus (5 hours on a straight, flat road through the desert) to Jodhpur, “the blue city.” We haven’t seen much of the city yet, but we have a beautiful view of the Jodhpur fort from our guesthouse rooftop restaurant. We wandered throught the old bazaar and checked out some spice shops. We also went to buy plane tickets. We’ve decided the next leg of our trip will be in Singapore. We’ll fly from Chennai (Madras) to Singapore on January 25. 5 more weeks in India.
Also a little update on our Christmas and New Year’s plans. We are going to spend Christmas in Udaipur, a town that’s supposed to be extremely romantic, with Josh and Marisa and others who we meet there. We’ve reserved a very upscale hotel for 3 nights, a treat to ourselves. Then we will head to the beach for New Years; there’s an island in Gujarat, Dieu, that’s was formerly Portugese. It’s famous for cheap beer and nice beaches. So we’ll spend Christmas in the desert and New Year’s on the beach.
Tags: BIG TRIP 2005-2006, In English 2005-2006, India
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