The World in 100 Words or Less

Here I am, back in Delhi, once again. After spending weeks in villages and small towns, I must say it;s difficult coming back to this city. It’s as if I’ve walked out of my room, having just awakened, only to be greeted by a sun that makes me squint. The traffic, the smog, cow shit, everything is difficult to take when you’ve been away from it for so long. Yes, even a week is a long time. Every week of travelling i’ve managed to cover over 500km (about 320 miles) of railroad tracks, back alley roads and highways. I am truly exhausted. But time necessitates travel, and the fun is in the journey, so I gotta keep moving. But here’s a recap of some assorted events.
After the festivities of Holi, I needed two days to recover. I had been partying hard all day long, drinking whiskey, chasing it with Kingfisher beer (they taste better back home), and finishing off the day with peculiar tasting milkshakes (I think the Indian guys had spiked mine with some of the local “herbal” products). So two days of sleeping and eating later, I decided to keep on moving. Jaipur it was.

Jaipur is the last stop in what tourists call the Golden Triangle: Delhi, Agra (Taj Mahal), Jaipur. Jaipur is by far the shopping mecca of northern India. It has shopping districts as massive, varied and confusing as anything in Thailand, including the Weekend Market. Myself and the three Brits I had met spent a day looking around, taking in some of the sights, but were left rather unimpressed. Jaipur was a city, the so-called “Pink City”. But the years of dirt and decay have left it rather orange and tattered. The history of these places is amazing but one must really strive to look beneath the mud, the broken windows and the rubbish on the streets. Its amazing to look at Jaipur and think that this was once a glorious city. All that is left is a shell of shopping markets and touts trying to get you to buy drugs. Dissapointment doesn’t describe it, because it was twice as expensive as anywhere else to boot. It sucked.

Im being too harsh, though. I will say that Jaipur is the jumping point for seeing some beautiful palaces and forts. In particular, Amber Fort sticks out. Amber Fort is set up in the mountains, 15 km of Jaipur. TO get there, the four of us piled into a rickshaw, leaving me, the big guy. to sit up front with the driver and tried to keep my head in the vehicle so I wouldn’t get killed by oncoming traffic. It was, without saying, rather exciting and frightening. Amber Fort really appears out of nowhere. You are gazing at countryside and mountains, bown up, giving way to the roads and then there it is. A magnificent structure resting on the top of one of the mountains, turned exactly amber by the last embers of sunlight left in the day. We climbed to the top, a breeze compared to the hill temple in Pushkar, and enjoyed sitting in the Kings courtyard watching huge monkeys steal food from tourists. The monkeys are not to be toyed with here in India. While in Thailand they’re pretty docile, here they’ll come at you. The difference in weight doesn’t scare them, because there teeth are bigger than ours and there’s more of them. So I, being the genius, decide to taunt one with a stick. They love recieving presents from you so I offer the biggest monkey a branch. He accepts it happily, but I decide not to let go. He doesn’t let go either. It literally becomes a pissing contest when he tries to piss on me, screaming at the top of his lungs. I decide to yield and move away. And so ends the battle between man and monkey.

That was really the end of Jaipur, save the stop at Pizza Hut.  Leave it to the three londoners to decided that Pizza Hut in India sounds like a great idea while the Chicagoan shutters at merely the idea of it.  So, after we all got sick from that, and learned that Pizza Hut was up-scale in India, we decided to all head back to Pushkar.  For me, I was tired from all the travelling.  I needed a vacation from my vacation as it were.  SO there I stayed and spent another 4 days relaxing, just taking in culture and meeting other travellers.  Oh, of course, I learned hot to really play cricket too.  It turns out the U.S. has a team.  Maybe I’ll try out when I get back home. 🙂

Walk outside, look around. Look to the rooftops, the gutters, the closed shutters.  Listen for running footsteps scraping powder against concrete.  Listen for laughs.

Holi Festival is a Hindu celebration that apparently goes back thousands of years (or so they say).  It is essentially an event commemerating a prince standing up against his father who had decided that he himself was a god.  Everyone throughout India celebrates the victory of the prince, the pious one, over his father, the king, by throwing colored powder and ink at each other.  But, the true festival starts the night before.

By the time I got to Pushkar, almost a week ago now, I was exhausted from the long train journey and the difficult things I had seen no the way.  Somehow, though, three British guys staing at the same hotel convinced me to join them on a hike up a local hill (small mountain) to a very sacred temple. My old knees killed me on the way up, but it was alright.  When we got to the top we were greeted by a view of all of Pushkar, a holy city set around a beautifu lake said to be created when a Hindu god dropped a lotus flower on Pushkar from above.  It all makes for a quaint little town set in the mountains, a mix of raucous foreigners and pilgrims on holy trips.  A very interesting lpace, no doubt.  But from above, it all seemed quiet.  The four of us sat there looking out on a city getting ready for the party of the year and to us, it looked like a town in a toy train set.  We were awakened from our quiet stares by the lighting of a fire behind us.  It made us all jump until we saw that is was the opening of Holi, marked by the burning of a fire and special rituals.  It made for quite a sight.  The four of us sitting there, watching orange embers dance into the sky, and three holy men speaking incantations.  Prepare for tomorrow, I thought.  Don’t wear any good clothes.

So there I was: inching out of the hotel, a bottle of colored water in my hands, ready to throw at the first person I saw.  A young boy quietly approached an outdoor faucet of water, preparing a fresh mixture of the ink and at the same time shifting his eyes around, knowing that he was an easy target.  I attacked swiftly emptying the whole bottle on him, his dark skin turning purple with the ink, his white shirt changing from green to a muddy brown.  Victory! Victory! Oh Shit!

In all my playing and laughing with the young kid, I hadn’t noticed the crowd of Indians, powder and ink in hands, that had grouped behind me, blocking the entrance vack into the hotel, and thus blocking my shelter of safety.  I chuckled, signaled to them, saying with my hands “Show me what you got”.  I walked back into the hotel 15 seconds later.  The manager of the place cracked up, the three Brits rolled on the floor.  I looked into the mirror, hardly recognizing myself through the oranges, greens, blues, purples and pinks.  Well, it can’t get much worse.  Now its time to party.  The Indian guys who had pelted me were more than happy to let myself and on of the English guys join their gang and continue on their drive-by spree of Pushkar.  Pushkar, being a holy city, does not allow aclcohol or drugs within the city limits.  But on holy, all these guys who never drink otherwise get liquored up on whiskey and cheap rum.  It makes for a drunken party, one that probably gets a little out of hand by Western standards.

 So there we were, roaming the streets nailing unsuspecting tourists with color, getting into color wars with other gangs, having a great time.  I found myself constantly reaching into plastic bags, removing huge fistfuls of of powder.  And somehow, the powder wood find its way to a face, a back, a stomach, whatever. Everything was in the moment and you completely gave yourself to the madness.  The best part was that the color was an equalizer of all peoples.  As we got to the rowdy dancing party in the center of town, Indian techno blowing people away from huge speakers, no one could tell between foreigner and Indian.  Everyone was the same and it was brilliant. Pink clouds of powder were thrown into the air and you could hardly see two feet in front of you.  People were hugging and singing, everyone was the same.  The pink powder gave way to yet another color, then yet another, until it all ended.

The party eventually closed down around 3 o’clock, I returned to my room.  For 8 hours everyone had forgotten about anger and hate, sadness and mourning.  I forgot about Jodhpur.  I opened the door to my bathroom and looked into the mirror at a face and body I did not recognize.  My pants and sandals were a mosaic of colors, as were my bare torso (having lost my shirt) and what used to be my face.  I spent the next hour washing it all off.  Greens, blue, purples sinking into the drain in the floor.  The deepest color, the purple, almost blood red, being the last to fall from my skin, revealing the cream shade I had become used to seeing.  I felt revived, having come back from the dead.

I spent that night walking the streets, looking into peoples’ faces, noticing a glimmer of their appearance from before.  A simple nod sufficed as a recognition of their participation in the days events.  Everything went back to normal.  Vendors opened their shops, package tourists appeared from their hotels, still wearing their rain jackets just in case.  The colors on the streets were the only sign of what had taken place.  And within days, that was washed away too.  Pushkar returned to its old self.  I became just another one of those travellers again.

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