Udaipur, Jaipur, Delhi and Kujuraho.

Myself, Sunil, the amazing tailor, Michael, and Durgesh in the front.

This is Andaman making villiage chicken, a delicacy in India.  Sunil said this is only the second time he’s had it ever!  (And yes, Andaman is not Andaman’s correct name.  It’s more like Deman I believe, but Andaman is what I heard when we were drinking one night so that’s what I’ll probably remember, Sorry Andaman)

Sunil sharing his lunch.  And whoever took this picture did a great job!

Vijay is psyched about having his picture taken.  And check out Sunil’s awesome non-electric sewing machine.  You can still buy those new in India.

So I’ve not been writing anything for a few days because I made some friends in Udaipur and there has been eating and drinking every night, which pretty much sucks up any time that might be used for writing.  It’s great for me.  I love making new friends, but when I don’t write things down I forget details pretty quickly.  Especially when traveling, there are always new and amazing things happening, that compete with the things you don’t want to be forgetting.

 This is the view from the balcony of my hotel in Udaipur.  The city palace is lit up every night.

 

The Jain temple in Ranakpur is one of the most amazing temples I’ve ever seen.

Parrots are everywhere.  There are still pigeons, but parrots and kites (which are like hawks) are also urban birds.

Morning in Udaipur.  Note the palace on the hill in the background.  In Rajastan every hill gets a palace or a fort.

These screens are carved out of stone. They appear everywhere in Mughal Palaces and can be incredibly ornate.

Inside city palace, Udaipur.

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This is one of the rooms in  which the sultan would meet guests.  The Mughals loved glass too.

Their painting style was incredibly small and precise.  This is a detail of, basically a graphic novel of the Ramayana done on one large sheet of paper.

 This painting depicts a royal tiger hunt.

 Fort at Kumbulghar.  Second longest wall in the world, and in amazing shape.  It runs 36 km around a large area of land.  There is a village and allegedly 365 temples in the enclosure as well as a heavily protected interior fort.

It’s an adventuring hat.  Indiana Jones has one.

What’s up CMOG?  Not saying anyone stole anyone’s logo.  I’m just saying.

Photos help, but sometimes there are smells, feelings, observations etc.  Ugh.  I should be getting some sleep right now.  I’m on a sleeper bus and it’s getting to Jaipur at 3am.  This is completely stupid, but I got rushed through the ticket buying process and shuffled onto this bus which sounds like it’s going to fall apart, and into a bunk with dirt all over it and now I’m looking at the prospect of arriving in a city I don’t know at 3am.  Fantastic.
 

Gompti Circle at 8:30 pm.  I should have stayed till 10:30.

 

Yeah.  That worked out about as well as I thought it would.  I ended up trying to sleep in a cold waiting room for about 5 hours.  It was a little too cold to make that happen really.  And there was the Bollywood on the TV.  The guy coming through and throwing soapy water all over the floor (but kudos for cleaning every morning) under my feet called an end to that charade and a beginning to my day.

I found a chai stall with a couch in it.  Still outside but soft cushy chair instead of hard metal chair and hot tea at your service.  A huge improvement.

 

Amber Fort.

These decorate the walls in the palace of the Amber Fort.  They remind me of Boyd Sugiki’s paper cutting, but of course these are marble.

The Hawa Mahal.  The ladies palace.

Across from the Hawa Mahal is one of Man Singh’s Jantar Mantar’s.  It is a giant observatory.  The large triangle is a huge sundial.

Throughout this day I saw the Amber Fort (the “b” is silent),  Dealt with an annoying but informational guide there, saw elephants, rode the local bus, met Sapan, went to the harem palace (Hawa Mahal), and caught a bus to Delhi. 

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Delhi



Sapan’s friend Sheela lives in Delhi.  She is awesome.  She let Sapan and I invade her space and life, still being jetlagged from returning from New York, just the day before or some crazy thing.

What all did we do there.  We saw the Red Fort, which is Delhi’s version of every other Mugal Fort in Rajastan.  Can you tell I’m about done being excited about forts?  
We actually did a lot of mausoleum and fort and mosque seeing in Delhi.  You will see a VERY strong Mughal style across all of of these buildings.

Hayuman’s Tomb

Don’t remember who’s tomb, but very nice.

This is the big Mosque in Delhi.  I love the domes on this one.

We also went to the B’hai temple which is clearly bucking the Mughal architecture trend.

This style of meal is what is called a Thali.  The bread at this place was particularly delicious.  They had a real clay oven that they baked everything in.

Sapan had to leave when we were just about done with the fort, and I was beginning to develop a rather serious cramp in my shoulder, so I lied down on the grass and tried to work the knot out of my shoulder and, bizarrely, the middle of my ribs on my right side.  I was wracking my brain trying to think what I could possibly have done to cause this, and it wasn’t until days later when I was doing the same thing again that it occurred to me.  Hanging onto the bar on the back of a motorbike, is probably what did it.  But the pain persisted through my walking over to the Mosque and walking down some amazing crowded alleyways and on into the evening.  I did find some ibuprofin in my bag which I never take, except for that one time on the Appalachian Trail when I’d tried everything and then it worked like magic on my shin pain.  This pain reminded me a lot of that pain and sure enough, about an hour after taking 600mg, the pain was almost completely gone and it didn’t come back the next day.  Magic.  Bizarre.  I still don’t like taking pain pills.

Sheela and I went to see the movie Descendants (I asked if there would be a mosh pit) which is about rich people dealing with life’s indignities.  It was fun to go to the movies.  There’s intermission in India.  And whenever they show an ad, they have to show their actual legal license to show that ad right there on the screen after the ad.  It’s a very uninteresting hand filled out form, projected right there on the big screen.



The next day I got going pretty late; 2:30 pm or so.  But I did go to see the Janter Manter which is a large set of cement (huge) constructions used to keep track of the sun and seasons and such.  They are pretty awesome.  They look so mad science.  A concrete (ha!) example of a very rich person with a very interesting, somewhat geeky, obsession.  I’m very glad I went, though the one is Jaipur looked maybe even a little more ornate.

The Delhi subway is world class.

Though Sheela told me that I was welcome to stay another night, I was determined to get to Agra by the next day and see the Taj Mahal.  This proved to be QUITE an adventure.  That will be for another post.

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 Khajuraho

On the way into town a young guy on the bus started chatting with me.  Turns out he helps run a guest house.  Imagine that!  But he seems like a really nice guy and I’m very happy I met him and stayed at his place.  He was very helpful in helping me plan my days in Khajuraho, bordering on pushy, but only bordering, and he did me right.  He drove me around on his motorbike to the temples around the town and took me to the shops of the people he knew, which seemed not so much like people that he’d get big kickbacks from, but more like poorer folks who could use a little business.  I bought a sculpture from one local artist.  Very nice guy, could use help with his displays and marketing though.

Rahim also gave me a bit of insight into the caste system in the villages we were driving through.  In the old village, there are four separate sections for four different castes and each has their own well.  The relative wealth between the castes is quite apparent in dress and housing.





So the first day Rahim drove me around and today I went to the big group of temples, which were amazing, and featured lots of sexy sexy sculptures.  No one seems to know exactly the reason for all the erotic art in Khajuraho or even why this area was chosen for such an extensive temple complex, but it certainly makes the local economy what it is today.

 

After the temples, Rahim promised to take me to a nice waterfall up north of town.  Before we left he asked if I’d like to go to the commercial one that costs a bit to get in, or to another place he knows of near a river and nice mountains etc.  So of course I chose the secret spot where there wouldn’t be crowds of people.
 

A bangle seller in the market.

Khajuraho is very notable as the first place that I’ve been in India where there is no madness at rush hour.  It’s mostly in the center of farming country, and even the downtown where people will run up to me and try to sell me things I don’t want is fairly low key in comparison to any other city I’ve been in.
 

So we headed out on the motorcycle taking roads, paved and dirt, into the countryside.  We took a break at the tiger’s house, complete with bones of animals on the porch.  Rahim told me a story of how Coyote tricked the tiger out of his house.  He also said that inside the house there is a very narrow cave that goes a long way into the ground.
 
The river was awesome.  We were in the middle of nowhere.  Only a couple people were around.  I went swimming out to some rocks in the middle of the river (the current was stronger than I expected for a river where I actually thought it was flowing the opposite direction than it was before I jumped in),  I think Rahim was impressed, because he grabbed my camera and took a picture of me before I swam back.
 
After swimming Rahim told me there was a little lake just 50 yards or so away through the scrub, so I checked it out looking for wildlife.  I saw a couple antelope scampering through the trees and a few birds, but the winner was what I’m guessing was a kingfisher.  It dove out of hiding in a burst of color, all blues and reds and yellows.  Hit the lake and I’m assuming caught a fish and then flew away to a banyan tree across the lake.  I got a couple blurry photos, which I was lucky to get.  It was brilliant.

We took another route home, travelling through more villages and herds of buffalo and a spot where the road became a mud bog.  We saw more excellent countryside and it just made me feel like I was seeing parts of India that I really wanted to see and that few people get to.  Really a great day.  And there’s still some sort of fish fry to go to later and an overnight train to Varanasi to catch.  Long day too.

 The fish fry didn’t actually happen, but we got to hang around a campfire with some nice village guys for a while.