Nadine's Blog

In the morning, Mohan drove us to Udaipur aiport to catch our flight to Jaipur. After checking in, there were a further three (!) security checks before we got on the plane, each one checking through our bags. The process was slow and long winded and frustrated a few people in the queue, but the various color coded stamps we received on our tickets let the organisers know exactly were everyone was in the process so we finally made it to the plane!

As we arrived to Jaipur, we organised a pre-paid taxi and proceeded to have a strange and confusing conversation with the driver about stopping to get his “mixie”. Always skeptical of some scam we were a bit doubtful, but when he took us to his parked car to collect a broken mix master from the boot, we realised that we were too suspicious for our own good – he just wanted to take the opportunity of a trip into the city to get his mixie repaired!

Jaipur was a really beautiful city, filled with contrasts – the sort of Indian city you see in large color filled photos in coffee-table books. It was full of contrasts – extraordinary architecture but filthy streets. Poverty was everywhere, in every corner of the chaos and bustle – more than we had experienced on our trip so far. Beggers were intensely persistent – grabbing and clutching at our arms and hands, pushing babies and little kids in front of us. It was exhausting emotionally – knowing that if you hand money to the person in front of you, there are dozens more who will take her place and she will still need more tomorrow.

We made our way to the hotel we had pre-booked to find no booking and no room, so headed to the hotel next door. It was the grimiest, filthiest hotel ever – it seriously looked like it had never been cleaned, surfaces were coated with a layer of ground in dirt, the cistern leaked so we had to keep the tap turned off, the bins in the halls weren’t emptied, but the beds were actually really comfy and the water was hot, so it did the job. The son of the old man who ran the place was very ernest, but his mild obsession with taking us up to the roof to admire the views was a tab creepy.

We dumped our bags, padlocked the door and headed off the old pink city. To me, it was a classic Indian city – at every intersection you could see trucks, buses, cars, autos, motorbike, bicycles, hand-pulled carts, cycle rickshaws (or ‘helicoptors’), camels, cows, people and dogs. The odd elephant as well!

Hawa Mahal, the Palace of Winds, was built in the 18th century as chambers for the Maharaj’s harem. The tall long building is made up of a honeycomb of ramped corridors and nearly 1000 windows which overlook the street below, allowing the women to take in the bustle and activity without being seen. We made our way up the ramps to the top, looking down at the bustling street below. From the top, the view extended across the city, taking in the palace, moghul style roof tops and pink sandstone buildings.

We headed down to the City Palace next, followed all the way by a group of women begging. “Restoration” had made parts of the palace look quite modern and plain, but in other areas, detailed mosaic like decorations were impressive.

In the central courtyard sat the two largest pieces of silver in the world – two huge silvers bowls, complete with traditionally dressed guards who will pose for photos in exchange for a tip. Problem is trying to get a photo without them in it!!

We took bicycle rickshaws back to our hotel – Dey’s driver was a funny old man who called his cyclo a ‘helicoptor’ and laughed and smiled the whole way. It was a fun way to travel through the bustle.

The next day we caught an auto to Amber Fort. Auto was not the best choice of transport because it was bumpy as hell and really dusty but we made it to the fort in one piece. I rode an elephant up to the top. There are 97 elephants working there and improvements have been put in place recently to make sure they are not overworked. They can only carry 2 people at a time and can only make 5 trips each day. My elephant was called Champa, and as she lumbered up the road we could see her 5 year old baby, Godi, across the pavillion, posing for photos with tourists.

The fort was gorgeous. Built of red sandstone and white marble, the style was a blend of muslim and hindu architecture. Sparse hills surround the fort and walls wind their way across the top and down to the old palace. Inside, the first stop was a Kali temple which had a beautiful atmosphere which matched its physical beauty. We wandered through and looked at the various chambers of the maharaj and his wives. A ‘secret’ passage winds through the palace allowing the king to discreetly visit different wives and concubines without knowledge of the others. Beautiful stone inlays decorated the main hall and a manicured garden filled the central square.

On the way back to the city, Dey sat on the back seat of the auto, looking out the back. Although we tried to anticipate bumps and call out warnings so she could brace herself, an unexpected bump jolted her so she whacked her head on the roof. The driver’s word of wisdom was ‘memory, memory’, meaning she would have something to remember from the journey! Next time, I think we’ll travel by car!

On the street on our way to dinner, a street barber was shaving the underarms of a man! Bizarre sight which made us do a doubletake. That night, our last in Jaipur, we played Euchre down in the grotty “restaurant” at the hotel, while a huge thunderstorm rumbled around us. The fact there was a guy asleep on the floor just didn’t seem that strange in this hotel! Interested experience…

Once back in Udaipur, we visited the local spice market to get some pics.

The market was sprawled over several small streets with most stalls set up in little shop fronts, rather than on the ground. Lots of people asked for photos as usual, so we spend a couple of hours snapping away then showing people the pics on the LCD screen. One old man was so blown away by seeing his picture that I am sure it was the first time he has had it taken. I took a pic with him and his grandson and got their stall address so will see if a copy can find him via snailmail.

Another day trip on March 7th – this time to Dungapur. Nafish, the guy who runs our hotel, said dung means bum so he kept laughing and saying we were going to bumville! Crazy funny man who got the giggles a lot, especially with us egging him on! The trip to Dungapur was on well made highways so was very uneventful. Uneventful until we actually got into the town of Dungapur when our driver went to la-la land for a minute and pulled out to pass one auto and ran straight into another auto. Luckly we were only going about 20kph so damage to us was nil and to the car and auto not so much. Luckily Rp250 from our driver to the auto resolved the situation and we headed on to the palace hotel.

The palace hotel was originally a palace but now half has been turned into a hotel, with the Maharaj of the region living in the other half of the old palace. It is a grand ornate building which has been well maintained.

The pool area is great – the pool is designed so it looks like it flows straight into the lake which neighbours the palace. It seemed like a good place to stay for a couple of days.

After the ‘new’ palace, we headed to the old palace. 700 years old and 9 storeys, it was very run down but throughout it were hints of the amazing place it must have been when people lived there. Lots of the paintings on the wall were still there and the sitting room was still fairly intact with its mirrored tiles and mosaics. The green maharani’s room was gorgeous with paintings of elephants and horses.

There was a Shiva room and Krishna room where faint paintings of these two gods still covered the walls. The place isn’t totally uninhabited – as we walked up the narrow stone stair case, a tiny leg of a bat moved and pulled itself back into the dark safety behind the door!

We stopped for a quick look at a couple of old temples before heading home. I noticed that instead of the meticulous stone fences which covered the hills on the way to Kumbhalgarh, this time fences were grown from cacti – less maintainance at least!

That night we went to the show at the Cultural centre. The actual space was fantastic – some old ornate building with an open courtyard in the centre, with arches and trees. We took our seats on the cushions on the floor and watched demonstrations of fabulous traditional dances, performed by women in colorful decorated costumes.

A puppet show had people laughing as a Maharaja juggled his head with hands and feet. The show concluded with the pot dance – a dance by one woman who progressively carried more and more pots on her head. The pots themselves weren’t enough so she not only lay down on the ground with the pots on her head and picked up a scarf with her teeth, she also danced on a pile of broken glass. The finale saw her run around in a large circle with over 10 pots on her head, leaving the stage to a frezy of claps and cheers!

The following day, Dey and I hired a small paddle boat and somehow managed to manaouvre our way around the lake. Well, we zig zag’d and backtracked a lot, but we did make it around. So many of our pictures are crooked though – amazing how hard it is to get a staight horizon in a tiny rocking floating boat!

For dinner we headed to ‘new’ Nataraj – a reknowned Thali restaurant. For Rp70 (about AUD2) we had a bottom-less thali made from the freshest ingredient, served by about 10 different waiters each offering a different curry, masala, dahl or bread. It was fantastic! On our way back to the hotel, we noticed a street we hadn’t explored which looked like it would offer an excellent shopping experience!

Exploring it that night, Dey found a store where she literally liked almost every minature painting in there and struggled to reduce her purchase to under 50! Well, 50 is an exageration, but that night and the next day Dey added at least another 10 pics to her growing collection! We headed back to the street the next day, our last day in Udaipur, and not only discovered a much needed place which made real expresso coffee (YAY!!) but had a beautiful, tranquil garden courtyard out the back. We passed a few hours relaxing in the garden oasis before heading reluctantly back to our hotel to pack.

Mt Abu was recommended as a beautiful hill-station worth visiting (the only hill-station in Rajasthan) for a few days so we booked a car for 3 days and headed up there. A new 4 lane road is being built and work has started with blasting the new cutting all the way, thus destroying the reasonable 1-2 lane road and leaving a slow journey along graded dirt roads. The mountain roads up to Mt Abu were a tad hairy every now and then when buses came hurtling around blind corners, causing Mohan to squeeze to the edge of the road. Monkeys proved to be entertaining scenery along the way – the way they sit on the sides of the road in various poses is so human-like it’s funny. As well as monkeys, elephants and camels became a common sight rather than novelties… (well, the elephants were still pretty exciting to see, even after we’d seen lots of them!)

Mt Abu itself wasn’t that much to write home about and Dey and I were both glad the travel agent had talked us down to two nights instead of our planned three. After checking into the hotel, we headed off to look at the sights.

The first stop was Dilwara temple. A fantastic Jain temple built between 800AD and 1200AD. Totally made of marble, the exquisite carvings were probably the best we had seen so far. No photography was allowed which dramatically sped up our visit – amazing how much time we usually spend going back through places taking photos! Being a Jain temple, no leather at all was permitted and “women in their monthly” are warned to stay away or “will suffer”!

After Dilwara, we headed to a Shiva temple, Achalgarh. The Brahmin priest there told us the well in the centre of the temple was 5000 years old! He pointed out the ‘toe of Shiva’, located a little way down the well and then directed us to walk around the inner shrine 3 times repeating the mantra.

Having completed the circuits of the temple, we headed back towards town. When we reached the Dilwara temple area, Mohan pointed out big bonfires which the locals were building in the middle of the road for Holi.

Holi is a festival to celebrate the start of spring and a time when people traditionally throw ‘color’ – bright colored dyes and paints – on each other. The night before Holi, bonfires are lit to represent the burning of Holika, a person who according to mythology tried to kill the good son of a power-hungry king. Since it was apparently close to the time when the fires are lit, we stopped to have a look. The bonfires were like tee-pees of wood, about 6 feet high. Kids had strings of dried cow paddies which were being draped on the wood as added fuel.

In front of one unlit bonfire, a priest was performing rituals, first performing some type of blessing for the fire, then performing poojas for people. I joined the short queue and was welcomed with a surprised look and smile by the priest, before getting the customary splotch of kum kum (a pretty enormous stripe this time, actually!) on my forehead and pooja bracelet on my wrist.

Finally, the fires were lit and both went up pretty quickly. The heat was huge – we were forced to stand across the road. As the bonfires burnt, people went up and seemed to make offerings to the fires – circling them and sprinkling water or rice, or offering a coconut. As with any festival, drums and chanting were loud and vibrant, adding to the great atmosphere.

Later that night and all through the next day, we avoided being covered in color which was being thown with joyous abandon! Some people were covered from head to toe with vibrant pink, purple, green, yellow and red. Water seemed to only secure the color more ferousiously – a group of women splashing around a water pump looked positively purple from head to toe.

Cows and dogs weren’t spared, but luckily most people asked if they could ‘color’ us and were happy not to when we said no. One man with a bag of pink powder did suspiciously follow us for a while but after a couple of backward glances from us, he clued on that he wasn’t going to sneak up on us and luckily gave up.

The Adhar Devi temple was beautiful, aside from the hundreds of stairs we had to climb up the hill to get there! The temple is built within and around natual rock forms so we had to literally crawl under rock overhangs to enter temples – amazing place. Since we weren’t allowed to take cameras in, we went in one at a time, leaving the other to mind our stuff and while waiting, spoke with the young priest near the entrance. He was part of the 11th generation of his family who have looked after the temple, and starts his day at 4am with his 3 brothers. A tiny straggly kitten stained with color wandered up while I was waiting for Dey to go through – he was happy for some attention, meowing loudly whenever I stopped patting him!

Our final stop was sunset point at Mohan’s, and the best part of that was the mischeivious smile on his face when he told us there was a 1km walk from the drop off point. The walk was easy and if there hadn’t been so much smog and haze, I’m sure the view would have been good as well.

So with Mt Abu ticked off the list, we headed back to beautiful Udaipur…

The next day, we headed up to City Palace, entering through the large “Elephant Gate” at the top of the road where Jagdish temple is located. The palace building is beautiful, with turrets and ornate decorations on the outside.

Inside the palace, the walls are covered in mosaics and painted murals – some in very good condition, some which have been left to deteriorate and some which have been “restored” in a way that has left them as quite pathetic shadows of what the original must have been.

In the first courtyard we entered, there was an open terrace to the side which contained several dozen stone sculptures from temples and forts around the area. Some dated back to 800AD and progressed through to about 100 years old. For things so ancient and precious, it was amazing to see them housed in a room open to the elements and to people – some had initials carved into them by ignorant tourists!

We spend a couple of hours wandering through the palace and then killed some time in the afternoon on the internet. I ended up being left in charge of the book store where I was using the PC when Kishore, the owner, needed to go for lunch. I sold 4 postcards which was a pretty good first attempt!

We caught the 5pm boat cruise around the lake and to Jagmandhir Island and then headed to the outdoor lakeside restaurant for a quiet G&T.

An apparently famous bollywood star was doing a photoshoot near there and had an elephant on standby for a prop (as you do….).

The elephant was gorgeous and enormous and had chalk paintings decorating her forehead. She was pregnant and we could see the baby moving round in her bulging tummy! Quite incredible.

We sat and enjoyed the sunset with a sitar and tabla player were playing beautiful Indian music in the background…

Thursday, we headed out on a day trip to Kumbhalgarh and Rungapur. As we got away from town, the landscape was dry and desolate, with small hills and sparse vegetation. The hills were lined with low stone walls, there were miles of them marking off small paddocks or huge areas. The work which must have gone into making them must have been incredible. Before long, Mohan, our driver, slowed and asked if we wanted to get out and take some photos. On the right hand side of the narrow road were three camels, laden ready for their journey.

With a flash of blue, a peacock jumped out onto the road in front of us and scurried to get across safely as Mohan manuvoured the car around him. As the peacock half flew, half jumped off the road and ran into the brush, I could see his brilliant blue colors and his beautiful long green tail feathers behind him. Amazing country it is where you see peacocks, camel, monkeys and elephants along the roads…

The deeper we went into the countryside, the more we noticed that the older women we passed on the way had large elaborate nose rings decorating their faces! Some of the rings where nearly 3 cm in diameter and looked incredible.

Kumbhalgarh was an incredible old fort. As we approached it up a steep mountain road, we could see parts of the 34 km external walls winding across the top of the hills. It was built in the 15th century and contains hundred of temples. Dey and I spent and hour exploring and only saw a handleful of them – it was the sort of place which you needed to have a few days to wander through and really absorb everything.

After the fort, we went on to Ranakpur which is reknowned for its Jain temple. This enormous temple was made of white marble, exquistely carved with Indian gods and scenes.

There are 1400 carved pillars supporting the temple – gives you an idea of the scale. The perimeter walls house deities of Jain gods, each contained in its own ‘cell’, wonderfully decorated. The main shrine is in the middle, and there were some women devotees sitting on the alter, chanting and playing instruments. There were a couple of other temples on the complex, each beautiful but smaller and less ornate than the main temple. The marble made them cool and calm inside – we spent an hour and a half wandering around the large temple, but could have easily spent hours more looking at all the intricate carvings.

As we headed back to Udaipur, we stopped at a little village and watched a man shape shallow pots from clay, using a flat piece of wood and thumping the clay over a stone mold. He made them so quickly and seemingly without effort!

The village was really pretty, but very basic. Very small, low houses made from with mud and straw bricks, or similar types of materials. Roofs were either tiled or thatched, but the weight of tiles on some made the structures sag precariously. Very simple living…