January 14, 2018
by Dan
With Christina gone to Rishikesh, I decided to stay put in Delhi one more day. Despite the smog I found a park, but the one I found was just barren and brown and dusty except for the trash littered everywhere. The smog made my eyes sting. And people were out enjoying the park like it was normal. I don’t have a good photo to portray this, but the level of environment apocalypse happening made me think of Mad Max, for real.
After that I went to the tailor for a custom shirt. Christina had gone to this shop, D. Vaish & Sons, to get some tailor-made suits for herself. When Christina went to get measured I wasn’t thinking of getting anything for myself because I don’t like dressing up. But since I do have trouble finding shirts that don’t choke me or billow out around the waist I decided to head back and get fitted. So now I got a guy in Delhi.
After that I decided to check out Jaipur which is part of the “Golden Triangle”: Delhi, Jaipur, and Agra (Taj Mahal). Christina and I are going to go see the Taj Mahal together after her training, so I thought Jaipur was the most obvious place to go. I was hoping that it would be a bit better in terms of the pollution and commotion since it’s a smaller town.
Next, how to get there? Originally I thought, ‘oh India, I’ll take the train and it will be a delight.’ No, you need to know where you’re going and book trains in advance (apparently you can get lucky last minute but it’s far from certain). After Latin America I was way too accustomed to winging it with travel planning. Just show up and figure it out. The only way to do that in India is buses.
Everyone says the buses suck and the more posh locals say that it’s not a good way to travel, but I love the buses here. They go everywhere for good prices. On some of them the suspension is gone so it’s bumpy and a bit uncomfortable, but I can sleep through just about anything so doesn’t matter to me.
The confusing thing about getting a bus ticket was that everyone was shouting things like “Volvo” “A/C” “seater” “sleeper” “1+2!!”… What? Ok, Volvo I guess is the fancy nice buses. A/C is obvious, but doesn’t matter because it’s winter. Seater means a seat … where you sit … like a normal bus. Sleeper means that above the seat are areas that you can lie down in. Definitely I wanted to take advantage of this on some overnight bus in the future just because it seems so cool to climb up into your little bunk for a bus ride. 1+2 or 2+2 means the number of seats on each side of the bus. 1+2 is nice if you are a single traveler and get to sit on the 1 side.
With location and transit settled, I took off from Delhi and arrived on Christmas night at Sindhi Camp which is the main bus hub in Jaipur. I was delighted by the long line of steaming colorful food carts and, relatively less traffic than Delhi, but it was still pretty crazy.
Then I took the wonderfully cheap metro to AmigosIndia Hostel. Oh man, what a great find. It’s a huge mansion of a place with excellent people. Not a literal mansion, but a big house. First thing I did was go on a beer run with a manager on the back of a moped. It was quite an adventure to get to live the Indian traffic experience from the inside. Then we had a bonfire, beer, tandoori chicken, and cake. It was a lot of fun.
Jaipur had a lot to offer tourists, but it all came at pretty steep prices. I had plans to see a lot more, but I found that I didn’t have enough time. Transit consistently took a lot longer than expected and the constant stopping to chat with people really slows you down. But I would never just brush people off here because I met some really friendly people by taking the time to engage everyone in conversation. I think it makes the journey more worthwhile overall even if I miss out of seeing the house of some rich dead dude.
First on the list of attractions was Amer (Amber Fort), which is the main tourist destination in Jaipur. There wasn’t much info on public transport options to get there but I found red public buses to Amer that left just east of Ajmeri gate. But I wasn’t able to make it all the way there because of a protest blocking the road. I couldn’t find an English speaker, but the protest had something to do with water.
I scored a ride on the back of a moped the rest of the way. It was an odd journey that consisted of a stop at the guy’s house to offer me water, picking up a make believe relative, and then riding in circles for a bit before leading me to a guy selling parasols and turbans outside of the fort.
The fort itself was amazing and huge. There wasn’t any signage so I first wandered through the narrow halls on the outer edge without other tourists. I got a bit lost in the process and so then headed back through to see the courtyards. The courtyards and main paths were jammed full of people. It was lots of fun imagining how grand it must have been in its heyday. And also because I’m ignorant, I make-believed different scenes in my head from Aladdin the whole time.
From there I just ran down to Jal Mahal because the traffic was backed up. It was only 4 km away and I didn’t feel like adding to the mess of motor vehicles at the moment. The Jal Mahal is a duck hunting lodge built in the middle of a lake. I still can’t wrap my head around what the city must have been like when these places were in use. The lake is pretty polluted and gross but it’s quite a cool building. Unfortunately you can’t actually visit inside of it. Over the next few days I had a lot of tuk-tuk drivers try to tell me that they could take me there for a good rate, and that it’s free, and there is a festival happening today. It was a strange scam and I probably would have fallen for it if I hadn’t visited already.b
On the next day I decided to hit up the rest of the tourist attractions in the city center. This ended up being just Jantar Mantar for time and money reasons. Jantar Mantar is a collection of astronomical devices, like huge sun dials and tools for measuring the locations of celestial bodies. It was like a big astronomy playground.
Also, fun story, as I was about to leave I saw a long queue forming. I had no clue what it was for and it was all Indians so I joined and tried to ask what was happening. No one knew what the line was for. It turned out to be a short movie about the history and geometry of the devices in Jantar Mantar. I couldn’t understand anything, but it looked like it was probably pretty interesting if you understood Hindi.
After my sightseeing of Jaipur I felt ready to move along. It’s a city of 3 million, so not exactly small. It was still too much traffic, smog, and tourist hustling. I wanted something calmer. There was more to see and do in Jaipur, but I was ready to go.
The next major tourist city is Udaipur, but since the new year was approaching and Indians love to travel in their country, all the accommodations were booked solid. After some internet research I came across the town of Bundi. There isn’t much written about it, there were rooms available that I could book online for a good price, and it only has 100,000 people in it. It sounded perfect. Turns out that it’s a pretty popular tourist destination and I saw way more foreign tourists here than in any other city. I don’t mind that, it’s just a curious observation given that the few blog entries I found say that Bundi is off the beaten path and authentic and hope that it stays that way. It’s tourist city for sure, just smaller.
I really enjoyed Bundi. I think it’s a top notch place to visit. The city is covered in beautiful wall paintings and there is a lively market area but it’s not too crowded. There are even moments walking on the street where you aren’t being passed by motorbikes. There is far less hustling going on and most of the time I was offered chai, it was just to chat and not to purchase things in tourist shops. I need to find more places like this.
In Bundi, I was able to hit pretty much all of the tourist sites, but mostly I just liked walking around the city. For tourist sites, there are two main packages. There is the Raniji Ki Baori, Sukh Mahal, 84 Pillared Cenotaph package and then the Garh Palace, Taragarh Fort package.
I opted for the former thinking that overall it was more sites and cheaper at 350 rupees (versus 500). But only Raniji Ki Baori was really worth it. It’s a super ornate step well, which is a water storage system for the city in past times. Step wells are all over the city, but usually abandoned and littered with trash. This one was well-kept and super cool. I would definitely pay the single entry fee to see it.
The 84 Pillar Cenotaph was cool but probably just fine to see from outside or buy the single entry fee. But I only counted 80 pillars. The internet confirms that this is a common first counting and maybe there is some trick to seeing the last four, but it was light on the details of the trick.
Finally, the Sukh Mahal was a huge let down. I wouldn’t recommend it even if it was free. It’s famous because Richard Kipling spend two days here and wrote Kim. It is not a palace, it’s not even that big of a house. The cost of this was quite high and accounted for most of the composite ticket price. There is a museum associated with it, but it would have cost an additional 100 rupees. I was not interested.
On my last day I decided to go to the palace and fort before I caught a bus out of Bundi. I was the first one there when it opened at 8 am. I was encouraged to head up to the fort first. “In the morning it is good for the health,” I was told. I think they just needed time to open up the palace. Off I went. I was diverted by a poorly marked trail that led me into a fight through some brambles. This resulted in some unfortunate tears in one of my favorite shirts that, just days before, I was thinking how great it was that it had lasted almost ten years.
