Cheryl and Mike’s Adventure

Well, we’re here in Jaipur (pronounced ya-Pour), we got in yesterday afternoon via train from Sawai Madhopur (more on that in a minute), and we’re here for one more day. Jaipur is a pretty big/major city (about 3 million people), visited pretty frequently by tourists. It’s the capital of Rajasthan, which is the Province/state/region of India which we are traveling around currently (and have been the last week or so). Today, we took in a guided tour of the city, which was pretty nice…we saw several old forts, palaces, and part of the old city, which is known as “The Pink City” due to the coloring of most of the buildings. The big excitement from yesterday was twofold, first we took in a “Bollywood” movie in the afternoon called “Aaja Nachle” (english: Come Let’s Dance, http://www.yashrajfilms.com/microsites/an/aaja_nachle.html). It was, uh, interesting to say the least. Actually, it was pretty entertaining, slightly bizarre, but in a good/amusing way. For those of you who don’t know what Bollywood is, it’s the India film- making industry, which is HUUUUUUUUUGE over here, and actually in a large part of the world. The films are largely musical/dance (as this one was), and although we couldn’t understand 90% of what was being said, we still got the gist of the movie and enjoyed it (more or less). The theater was very nice, but it should be noted that the movie experience is much different over here…there’s a lot of whooping and hollering, and you shouldn’t expect people to be quiet for the most part. But nonetheless, certainly a pretty true Indian experience overall. The second highlight of the day was another pilgrimage to our own personal temple in India, Pizza Hut (Cheryl can sniff them out from several cities away, I think…but who’s complaining?). Tomorrow, we’re just going to take it easy and shop around the Bazaars, there’s evidently some of the best shopping in India here and we’re going to check it out.

Prior to our arrival here, we visited two parks, first the Keoladeo National Park in Bharatpur (where the bird sanctuary is), and the Ranthambore National Park in Sawai Madhopur (where the Tigers are/were). Both places we were there 3d/2N. The bird park/Bharatpur was enjoyable, but not quite what we were expecting. The town wasn’t much to write home about, and the park was nice, we rented some (ancient) bicycles and cruised through on a paved path early in the AM, but it was definitely one of those cases where the guide book/pictures sort of looked better than it actually was, so to speak. We had a good time, however, riding through the parks, it was all very nice and peaceful …a break from the Urban India scene. And we did see a fair number of very nice looking birds (amongst other wildlife) while we were there. The highlight of the trip may have been the near-Me lee we witnessed on the bus ride to the town, where, from what we gathered, a couple of gentlemen and the bus operator (I guess that’s what you would call him) got into a full blown shouting shoving match, in the aisle of the bus, while in full motion, over a seat. Evidently, someone’s seat was given to a dog that another person had brought aboard the bus (you can’t make some of this stuff up). Anyway, it was a completely chaotic scene, people holding people back, screaming in languages we can’t understand in the least…absolutely fascinating/surreal/terrifying/slightly hilarious, all at the same time. I guess like so many things, you had to be there.

The trip to the Tiger Sanctuary in Sawi Madhopur was more of what we were expecting, as far as the Park and the surrounding town, etc. We arrived on the later side in the evening, via train (this was the least comfortable ride so far) and booked everything that evening with the hotel owner for the next day. We were going on Safari, at 6AM, via Jeep (more expensive, only 4 people can go in 1 Jeep, quieter, smoother ride than the gigantic open tourist buses, which was the other option). The park was beautiful, much more what we were expecting, very quiet, wooded and peaceful that early in the morning. The whole trip lasted about 3 hours, and unfortunately, we did not catch a glimpse of a tiger. The weather was lousy, a slightly steady rain the whole time (incredibly, the very first time we have seen rain our whole trip), which didn’t help because tigers kind of lay low when it’s raining out, apparently. Since we didn’t see anything, we decided to splurge and go again in the afternoon, only this time on one of the (much more crowded) tourist buses. We had a near-sighting at the end (the tiger was spotted, a bunch of the buses stopped for awhile, but apparently it ran off quickly), but we were shut out again. We were a bit bummed, but all in all the safaris were pretty cool, and we had a good time on them (the AM one more so).

That’s it for now…we’re both tired at this point (Cheryl’s been asleep for like an hour now, I think), and if we get a chance we’ll add another tomorrow if there is any excitement from shopping. Really, every single day has an element of excitement…simply walking around on the streets here you can’t avoid it. Hard to believe, but we are heading back to the states in less than 2 weeks now. It’s interesting, at this point we’re definitely both more adjusted to India, and much more comfortable moving around and dealing with the day to day stuff, etc. (it’s fun to look back at the first couple of days now). I think we’ll be looking forward to being back by the end of the trip, and we’re both looking forward to Christmas. Drop us all a comment if you get a chance, we miss everyone and always look forward to hearing from everybody!

Cheryl & Mike

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 4th, 2007 at 12:17 pm 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.