Asia

Cows, birds, and a few worshippers around Lake Pushkar

As we were planning this India gig that includes a Grasshopper Adventure bike tour with fixed dates we had a couple extra days to deal with. So we decided to take a little side trip down to Pushkar, a Hindu holy city that is supposed to be visited at least once by devout Hindus. The town is built around Lake Pushkar, supposedly created with Brahma – the Hindu creator – dropped a lotus flower there. Today the city is a strange mix of Hindu mysticism and backpacker funk. One peculiarity of Pushkar is that, because of its religious importance, meat and eggs consumption is prohibited throughout the city. Fortunately we were staying outside the city proper, so we weren’t terribly affected except when we wanted to go into the city for lunch. That didn’t work so well.

Actually, our hotel was one of the weird things about our visit. We stayed at a Westin that opened just last year, about a 20-minute drive out of Pushkar. The strange thing was that for the life of us we couldn’t figure out why there was a resort way out there. Our experience is that when we’ve stayed at remote resorts they’re either on a beach or they focus on the remote, rural surroundings. Not this one. No beach within hundreds of miles and the comparatively small footprint was surrounded by walls with all the rooms facing inward toward an unimpressive pool. There was nothing wrong with the place, but there was nothing particularly good about it either. I don’t know what Westin was thinking…

The kids of rural India on our walk into town

The good news was that while it was a long walk into town – an hour and forty minutes or so, so definitely a long walk – parts of it were beautiful. This was true rural India and the first time in the two weeks we’ve been in India that we felt we were seeing more than just urban insanity. No spectacular scenery or anything, just quiet rural peace (or at least an Indian version of tranquility). The bad news was that the long walk was not injury-free. Just about half way into town I tripped on some broken pavement, went down with a crash and twisted my ankle. Ultimately nothing too bad; no sprain and certainly I didn’t break anything. I pretty much had to finish the walk in since, at the half-way mark, it was going to be as far either way and way out there were no tuktuks offering rides. But for the next few (several?) days I’m going to be lying low. After 103 consecutive days of surpassing my “Move” goal as set by AppleWatch my streak was broken. Sad!

As for the town itself, it was fun. We’re starting to get into the swing of this India thing, rolling with the intensity and chaos and squalor and all that and appreciating the parts that we like. Lake Pushkar was nothing like I’d been expecting. When I think “lake” I expect greenery, nice paths maybe, something approaching a park setting. Not here; it was remarkably small, really just a pond, and completely surrounded by cement sidewalks and mostly ugly buildings. It is holy, though, so there were lots of people around the edges bathing and otherwise partaking of the holiness. The surround area was definitely more bohemian backpacker than holy which adds a special flavor.

Pushkar’s main tourist/backpacker street

Enough of our side trip. It was a three-hour drive out to Pushkar and after our visit we had to get back to Jaipur to catch a flight to western Rajasthan. We scheduled a 6:30 AM departure which meant we left on Christmas Eve while it was still dark and thus got to enjoy a sky full of stars. That might have been my favorite part of the whole stay!

Lake Pushkar from Laura’s, a café where we thought we might have lunch. When we discovered the all-veg menu (which translates to “all-carb”) we left after just a bottle of water.

We love the bright colors in India

A woman outside one of the many temples lining the lake

Mark on the lake

Cute monkeys!

Cute door

Another of Pushkar’s temples

Mark takes a lot of pictures of cows. Oh, and there are a lot of cows in India.

More rural peace – and a cow of course

Mark with Deepac, a server at the Westin who poured good glasses of wine

And me with just a little festive Holiday spirit. Merry Christmas!

Street scene in Jaipur, the Pink City

Starting from our stay in Ranthambore we are spending most of our time in India in the state of Rajasthan. Located in the northwestern part of the country, Rajasthan is India’s largest state, accounting for over 10 percent of the landmass. Now that we have those tigers out of the way our first urban stop is the capital Jaipur and, with a little over three million people, the state’s largest city. Supposedly a major tourist destination (though we didn’t see a lot of western tourists), it is the home of two UNESCO World Heritage Sites.

The city dates from 1727 when Jai Singh II, after whom the city is named, moved his capital here from nearby Amber. For our admittedly limited purposes here the next important thing that happened in Jaipur was in 1876 when, in anticipation of a visit from the Prince of Wales – later Edward VII – Sawai Ram Singh I ordered the city’s buildings painted pink. The order remains in effect in the old city, thus explaining why Jaipur is sometimes known as the Pink City.

One of the gates into the old city. That’s definitely as pink as you’ll find here.

I like pink so my hopes were high. Only to be crushed. By my standards “pink” would be an overstatement. More kind of a faded, dirty, peeling, crusty salmon maybe, with lots of brown smudges. After I got over my disappointment I could find a certain attractiveness to the city, but I would definitely not call it pink.

I have to admit that I’m surprised at just how dirty, squalid even, we are finding these Indian cities. I mean, we’ve been to India before and we know it’s poor. I’ve read Katherine Boo’s stunning Behind the Beautiful Forevers, her National Book Award-winning masterpiece on poverty in Mumbai. But somehow it seems as though I’ve read a lot over the last few years about how India is finally booming. And after the time we’ve spent in China, where huge cities have sparkling parks and beautiful transit systems, I was expecting a little less of, well, the filth and a little more sparkle. There’s not a lot of sparkle to be found. Stories of a resurgent India are likely true, but from such a low base. In fact, according to the World Bank India’s per capita income is just $6,490 compared to China’s $15,500. Thus the squalor we find here versus the clean parks in China.

The Pink City didn’t quite live up to its billing as far as I was concerned

Once you start to accept Jaipur on its own terms though – no pink, no sparkle – you can start to appreciate its own beauty interesting qualities. The first big site to visit is the Amer Fort, about seven miles outside of Jaipur and the region’s original capital. One of Jaipur’s two UNESCO sites, the “fort” – it’s really a palace – is laid out in four sectors, each with its own courtyard. As we experienced in both Delhi and Agra, the palace here again reminds you that there was once a lot of wealth and power in these places. Beautiful carved sandstone, marble, lattice-work windows (so the women could see out but others couldn’t see in…), mirrored walls and ceilings – this place has it all.

Mark and me outside the Amer Fort. We had a driver take us out there and he just couldn’t believe that we wanted to walk up to the fort, to experience the normal entrance, rather than being driven up.

The next big site was the City Palace, the home of Jaipur’s Maharajas from the 18th century on. Interestingly, and unlike most historic royal palaces we see, this one is still occupied, and still occupied by the royal family. Even though there isn’t a royal family. Royals were eliminated in India in 1947 when the country gained independence, though royal titles were retained until constitutional changes were imposed in 1970. The Maharaja of Jaipur kept his home, though, kept living here, and people kept calling him the Maharaja or King. When he died in 2011 his adopted son – his grandson in truth – ascended to the no-longer throne and is now called the King, even though he has no formal role.

Padmanabh Singh, the King of Jaipur. This is just a picture from the Internet; we didn’t actually see him.

Oh, and there is a bit of scandal here. The current king, Padmanabh Singh, is the son of the old king’s daughter, his only child. Expected to marry into royalty of some sort, though, she married a commoner and, worse yet, the son of one of the king’s staff people. Imagine the horror; apparently people really were aghast. Not to worry, though; the marriage didn’t do so well and once the commoner was out of the picture the king formally adopted his grandson so he could ascend to the pretend throne.

At any rate, we shelled out big bucks – something like $30 each – for a tour of the palace. That’s really quite unlike us, as we usually don’t like tours. In this case it was the only way to see the inside of the palace – the part that’s not currently lived in, at least – and it was worth it. Nothing earth shattering or anything, but lots of pretty stuff and a better understanding of how all that royal stuff works around here.

There was one last site to visit, right near the City Palace, called the Jantar Mantar. It’s a collection of 19 architectural astronomical instruments built by Jaipur’s founder Jai Singh II and is Jaipur’s other UNESCO site. The various instruments include the world’s largest sundial, a device so accurate that it supposedly indicates the time to within two seconds. Of course, as Mark points out, our AppleWatches are exactly correct, so what’s the big deal? To be honest, I just don’t have much of a scientific bent about me so I really didn’t get much sense of what it was all about. To a junior astronomer, though, it must be a pretty interesting place.

So that was Jaipur. Not as pink as I’d hoped but a tasty treat once you get over the dirt and honking and all that. And surprisingly picturesque, we discovered, as we went through all the photos we’d taken.

Mark in one of the rooms of the City Palace open to private tours

The peacock is India’s national bird. This is one of the entrances to one of the courtyards in the City Palace.

The view out over Jaipur from atop the City Palace

Colorful guards

Here we are hanging out in one of the comfy rooms of the Palace

Some of the courtyards in the City Palace. In the background you can see Jantar Mantar, Jai Singh II’s collection of astronomical instruments; the tall angled thing near the top center is the world’s largest sundial.

Mark’s selfie atop the City Palace

Here I am at Amer Fort

I wasn’t alone clambering around up there

Amer Fort

Just a couple of Indians hanging out

A classic Jaipur site is the Hawa Mahal, the Palace of Winds. It was built with 953 small windows, each decorated with latticework so the women of the palace could see out without others seeing them.

The streets of Jaipur were never dull

Just a crowded side street

Traffic in India everywhere is crazy. Something about sharing the road with every type of vehicle and animal imaginable.

Including, in Rajasthan at least, camel-powered vehicles

Markets share the streets, too

One of many, many monkeys you see in Jaipur

Walking toward the old city we passed this parking lot jam full of scooters caked in dust, suggesting they’d been there a long time. We had no idea why they were just seemingly abandoned there.

Oh, and Mark got a haircut there, too; the young kid in the center was particularly excited about this strange white guy. Along with a head massage and face massage it came to $7.

Arrowhead, in all her majesty

From Agra we took a train to a little town called Sawai Madhopur, just outside the Ranthambhore National Park. Or at least, the plan was to take a train to Sawai Madhopur. The problem was that it was a connecting train, first from Agra to Mathura, then on to Sawai Madhopur. When we got to the train station, though, our train was delayed by at least an hour, meaning that we would miss the connection. “What should we do?” we asked an official. He suggested we hire a taxi to Mathura; if we left right away we’d get there in time to catch the train. “Can we get a refund on this leg of the journey?” No. Oh, and if the car gets stuck in traffic – by no means an impossibility in India – then we’ll miss that train, too, and be no closer to our destination.

Pretty much all the trains through here were late

So for $25 we hired a taxi and made it to the train with only a couple minutes to spare. Except that train was an hour late. Until it was 90 minutes late. And 15 or 20 minutes after that schedule, eventually our train showed up. Our experience from Delhi to Agra had been so good – train on time, comfortable seats – but this one, not so good. Essentially every train out of Mathura was late, some up to three or four hours late. And when we did get onboard it was definitely not as comfortable as the train from Delhi either. Mark has found the process of buying tickets online incredibly frustrating (one site he went to asked “What train do you want?”, rather than where you are going from or to, as though of course everyone knows the name of the train), and then this. First lesson, then, about traveling in India by train: don’t do a journey requiring a connection.

These are definitely not Japanese trains. Fortunately, the first class cars are *slightly* nicer than this. Not that much, though.

OK, so eventually we made it to Sawai Madhopur and caught a tuktuk to our resort. We were splurging to stay at an Oberoi, a very upscale place so surely this would work, right? Not so much. The security guard at the gate checked his list, and there was no Mark Sullivan scheduled to arrive that day. How could that be? Mark checked his confirmation email – he’s learned to keep those well-filed and accessible – and it sure seemed we had a reservation. They checked again and still nothing. Eventually we worked with the manager and she said they would honor the reservation we had even though they couldn’t find it in their system. Nice of her, particularly since our credit card had already been charged for the stay! But it would take 30 or 40 minutes to get the room ready, not something I was too happy about after our lousy journey.

Finally we got to our room, and a day or two later learned what had happened. Turns out there was another Mark Sullivan scheduled to arrive that day but he had rescheduled to arrive two days later. Somehow they either deleted our reservation or moved both of them; either way, that explained why they didn’t have us on their list the day of our arrival. If the resort had been full, we’d have really been in a pickle. Fortunately, though, it all worked out. We got to meet the other Mark Sullivan and had a fun 15-minute chat about all the Johns and Dans and Corneliuses in the family. Better yet, when we checked in they had told us our package included not just breakfast but free dinner and half-priced cocktails at happy hour. “Really?” we asked. “We don’t remember that on the reservation.” Yes, we were told, that was the package. In retrospect, we suspect that the other Mark Sullivan’s package included all that and by the time they figured it out they were too embarrassed to tell us we’d have to start paying full price. All in all their mistake worked out pretty well for us. The only downside was the way staff have been trained to pounce the second you move to make sure that you never have to pour water or wine or serve yourself food or … anything. Definitely a little annoying but if that’s all you have to complain about you’re probably doing fine.

Mark Sullivan on the left and … Mark Sullivan on the right!

Ok, now we can get to the tigers. The only reason tourists would ever go to Sawai Madhopur is because of the proximity to Ranthambhore and the tiger reserve. The reserve was created in 1973 when Prime Minister Gandhi recognized that India’s famous Bengal tigers needed protection from hunting and poaching. This was one of the earliest reserves created but even so the number of tigers is relatively small, maybe 65 or so, though that is a considerable increase over the 25 or so tigers there as recently as 2005. Ranthambhore is considered a good place to see tigers, though, as the deciduous forest in the park makes spotting them much easier than in the rain forests further south. Still, they estimate only a one-in-five chance of seeing a tiger in any one outing.

We got lucky. On our first morning we were paired with a friendly British couple who were on their third and last outing; they were leaving after lunch. They had been out twice the day before and saw a fleeting leopard but no tigers. So we’re bouncing around the reserve in a jeep with a driver and guide, stopping here, listening, watching, stopping, and so on. Suddenly after perhaps 90 minutes there she was, a beautiful three-and-a-half year old tiger out marking her territory and rubbing herself on trees, trying to attract a male while keeping other lady tigers away. She took little notice of us as she’s learned the jeeps are no danger. She’s not tame or anything close to it, though; the guide was clear that she’d eat us if we got out of the jeep and she happened to be hungry.

Arrowhead

Leaving her smell on trees in case there are any guys around looking for a good time

So for 10 minutes or even longer we watched as she wandered around. If she wanted to go where our jeep was sitting we moved the jeep. Simply put, she was magnificent, the colors, the paws, the fur, the eyes; just an incredible animal. Eventually she went deeper into the woods then, but those 10 minutes were pretty phenomenal. It’s worth noting that while tigers are the main draw, they were by no means the only wildlife we saw on our three-hour mini-safari: there were spotted deer, wild boars, a mongoose, a sloth bear, plum-headed parakeets, peacocks, lots of monkeys, even crocodiles. And we haven’t even gotten to Africa yet!

Lots of these plum-headed parakeets in the woods

We could have gone out on more rides (if we wanted to pay for them, of course) but beyond the expense we just figured why? Given the one-in-five odds of seeing a tiger, another trip would likely have been disappointing and anticlimactic. So instead we spent the next full day just hanging around the beautiful resort. At one point in the afternoon after I’d done my chores (laundry, some tax stuff, time on the treadmill) I was lying on a lounge chair outside our room. The trees were lush, the bougainvilleas vibrant, birds were chirping, the laundry was drying in the breeze, and I was reading my Lenin biography while listening to Chopin. Life doesn’t get much better than that.

From here, then, it’s back on a train and on to Jaipur, known as the Pink City and capital of Rajasthan. Back to real India!

Just a shot of one of the “workers” at the train station

Once they let us in, the grounds of the hotel were beautiful

They even keep their own elephant around just for fun

A sloth bear crossing our little road

Untold numbers of these rhesus macaques out there

A wild boar mama cleaning her young ‘un

Crocodiles out there, too. We decided not to go for a dip.

That’s the head of a cute little owl peeking at us

A tree full of bats they call flying foxes

There is apparently a famous picture from Ranthambhore of a tiger sleeping in the windows of that building across the lake

More pictures of Arrowhead

She was incredible