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. 🙂

Tags: Travel

This entry was posted on Saturday, March 25th, 2006 at 2:48 am and is filed under Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.