End of the road

Bikaner, another desert town, was my last stop on my car tour. As with everywhere else in Rajasthan, the fort and the palace is the obligatory stop. In the case of the palace, it’s actually now a fancy-pants hotel which I had dinner in (and significantly overpaid for). While the interior of the fort was pretty cool, the thing I really liked was the atmosphere and the autorickshaw ride I took through the old town. I wanted to see an old 16th-century Jain temple in the old town, and because you can’t fit a car in the narrow, winding streets, my driver hired an autorickshaw for me. It was driven by this amiable old guy that took me around a bit, pointing out some old havelis along the way. I really enjoyed the spin we took down a busy market street, lined with small shops selling things to the locals. We drive by several shops selling dried spices and chilies which looked pretty tasty. The rickshaw driver points and says “Good masala”, as we drive by one. The temple was pretty cool, too. Despite its age, it looked very colorful and vibrant due to a restorative paint job they had done on it recently. While there the temple high priest, a shirtless guy with a big, fuzzy desi-fro, gave me a little background on the place. Apparently, he is the 32nd in a direct line of continuous ancestors with the high priest gig at this particular temple, dating back to when it was built in the 16th century.

My favorite aspect of Bikaner, though, was the omnipresence of camels on the streets. You’d run into a fair amount of camels throughout Rajasthan, particularly as you headed west towards drier areas. However, these were mostly in the country or in tiny cities like Jaisalmer. Bikaner’s a decent-sized city, with an urban population around 550,000 people, and all the congestion and traffic you’d expect of an Indian city that size. It cracked me up to see camel carts weaving in and out of busy intersections filled with rickshaws, cars, and motorbikes.

Because of my lost sick-day in Jodhpur, we didn’t have time to get to Madawa, so Bikaner was our last stop. The next day it was straight into Delhi, with 8 hours on lousy country roads. During the trip, I was figuring out how to present my driver’s tip. Because of the crap he pulled in Udaipur, the tour operator actually told me I shouldn’t tip him at all, but I didn’t feel very comfortable doing that as he’s otherwise done a pretty good job. Were it not for that occurrence, I figured I would have given him a tip amounting to slightly greater than 15%. I subtracted out the difference in the cost of the hotels which I ended up staying at in Udaipur in order to make myself whole, and then gave him the balance, which came out to a little under 10%. I was steeling myself for some drama when I gave it to him, half expecting him to complain and ask for more, but thankfully he just thanked me, told me to call if he came back to India and needed another driver, and left.

The good news is that I had time for dinner. So I catch a taxi to Bukhara, which is supposedly THE place to have Indian food in Delhi. I almost balked at the last minute when I found out how much it cost, but figured I could go for a splurge. The restaurant is located in a high-end hotel in the city, and one thing that struck me about it was the security. When my taxi pulled in, we were stopped at a security checkpoint where the guards actually searched both in the trunk and under the hood of the car. I guess they thought I looked like a shady character. While waiting for a table, I struck up a conversation with a couple people that just happen to live about 3 miles from me in Chicago, I ended up joining them and their two Indian friends from Mumbai and Dubai for dinner. Good times.

The next day I caught my flight to Hyderabad and went out the meet my work colleagues. I stopped by the office there, which is a pretty fancy setup. Deloitte has 5 large office buildings in a large, government-sponsored corporate campus called HITEC City. Driving down the street, you’d see office buildings with marquees advertizing plenty of household names, Amazon, Google, Oracle, Dell, and Motorola among them. The offices themselves are modern steel and glass setups that look pretty much exactly like a Deloitte office in the states look. So I finally meet the crew that I’ve been working with for the past 2-4 years face-to-face, and then we head out to a team dinner. It was a fun time and the meal was very nice, but there was a planning screw-up with the meal. I was all fired up to try the local cuisine which Hyderabad is so famous for, so the first thing I say when I get the menu is “Where’s the Biryani?!” To my horror, the waiter informs me that this is a north Indian restaurant. I turn to the team and shriek “Dude, I just spent 20 days in Rajasthan, Delhi, and UP, and you bring me to a north Indian restaurant! WTF!” Well, I may have actually been just slightly calmer than that. Some people may be seeing some additional feedback on their year-end evaluations in a couple months, though.

In terms of things to see, Hyderabad was pretty low-key, but I really enjoyed the city. It’s a much more pleasant and livable city than Delhi—more trees and grass, better roads, less dirt and trash, few people making inappropriate comments as I walk by them in the streets, etc. I think the fact that I’m staying in a much nicer hotel than at any other stop on my trip helped, too. Hyderabad may also have been the best food destination of the trip, too. Over the next day, I was able to score a couple of those biryanis, and they didn’t disappoint. This may be something that I’ll need to play around with when I get home.

So that wraps up the gig. I’m finishing this post at the airport as I digest my last biryani which I grabbed at the hotel this morning and wait for my plane back to Delhi. After that, I’ve got a 6+ hour layover, and then my 15-hour flight back to Chicago. It will be nice to be back.

Musings on the gym, regurgitation, and camels

Jodhpur was pretty nice. The big attraction, as is the case with most cities in Rajasthan, is the big fort overlooking the town. The town itself is known as the “blue city” because many buildings are painted blue, as is the tradition of the Brahmin caste which largely populated the city (or something like that). Walking around you do definitely see quite a few powder blue buildings, but not some much to make you say that the whole city is blue. That is, until you get up in the fort and are looking down at it from the top of the hill, at which point you say “Oh, yeah, it’s blue”. Be sure to check out the snaps as I got some pretty cools ones there.

Aside from the city itself, I really enjoyed the people in Jodhpur. I had many decidedly non-commercial interactions with people. Since I didn’t get a good night’s sleep either night in Udaipur, I slept in a bit the first evening in Jodhpur to catch up. By the time I worked out in the morning and got cleaned up, I had missed breakfast. So I headed out looking for some street food, and found an interesting looking place that was making some kind of pakora, some fried thing that was like a big mash of some kind of mystery paste, potatoes, and a whole green chile. Pretty tasty. I also picked up some scrumptious, drippy-goey Indian sweets there. As I was doing this I got in a conversation, or maybe just a semi-conversation because he hardly spoke a word of English, with a guy also grabbing a bite there. He was recommending certain sweets to try, etc. He actually bought me the different things he recommended, which was a refreshing change of pace. I thanked him, waved goodbye, and headed over to check out the town center. While milling around there I ran into him again. He sees me, and says, “Oh, you must have omelette!” “Omelettes?”, I think to myself. Anyways, he pulls me over to this shop to order a masala cheese omelette. I’m not really hungry any longer at this point and don’t want to spoil my lunch, but it’s nice to interact with somebody that doesn’t have an ulterior motive and I want to be polite so I sit down, I share a chai with him while waiting for my omelette. While waiting, his brother, a bodybuilder, shows up and we also get in a conversation as he hoovers down a plate of egg whites. I wasn’t very impressed with the omelette, but it was again nice to connect with some locals. And to my embarrassment, he buys my breakfast again over my protestations. So it was a nice start to the day.

After that I burned off my superfluous omelette by hoofing it up to the fort and checking it out. I then head over to the market, and go searching out a particular place for lunch. It occurs to me that I’ve got time, so I decide to grab a workout. All I can do in my room is pushups, situps, and chair dips, so it would be nice to get one workout in while I’m in India for my back, shoulders, and biceps. So I ask the guys at the restaurant if they know of a gym in the area, and luckily they know of one about ½ mile away. It takes me quite a bit of time and multiple queries for directions to find the place, but eventually I get there and walk in. There doesn’t appear to be anyone working the desk at the moment, but the few guys working out there come over and invite me in. I ask if I should pay somebody first, and they all respond, “Hey, don’t worry about it. Just come on in.” So the workout commences. I’m just in my street clothes, but it doesn’t really matter as that’s what half the guys there are wearing anyways. It’s about 4:30 at this point, so I suppose the after-work/school crowd is now arriving, and the place if filling up with people. It definitely wasn’t that great a workout, but was a rather amusing experience. After hitting my recently neglected muscle groups, dispensing 75 pieces of workout and diet advice, posing for about 50 photos with 15 different guys (including quite a few flexing poses, to my embarrassment), and being told about a dozen times that I look like Salman Khan (a Bollywood actor I don’t even vaguely resemble aside from the fact that we’re both in shape), I ask one more time if I should pay somebody. I’m told by the guy that works as a personal trainer there that showed up after I did, “No need”, so I thank everybody and head out.

Later that night I also had a great time chuming around with some locals at an internet café, and then went out to grab a nice dinner. So Jodhpur was on track to be a fantastic time. And then disaster strikes. That night I become seriously ill. At first this manifests itself simply as an extreme case of traveler’s intestinal problems, but it progresses to include a severe stomach ache, fever, chills, and nausea. By the next morning I’d gotten to the point of experiencing my second or third worst illness of my adult life, which needless to say, kind of throws a wrench in the plans of driving 4 hours to Jaisalmer and going on an overnight camel safari that evening. My driver, who had stopped behaving lake a jerk the day before, updates my hotel reservations and arranges for me to stay another day in Jaipur and brings me some “Indian medicine”. I thus spend almost the entire day lying around in bed and trying to sleep. I also hardly ate. All day long I just had two mango lassis and two bowls of milk porridge. I did get up in the evening to go across the street to the internet café and finalize my flight reservations to visit my colleagues in Hyderabad 6 days later, in the middle of which I run outside into the street and throw up the copious amounts of water I had been trying to force into my stomach in an effort to rehydrate myself. I barely made it outside and ended up splattering some of my vomit all over a cow that was hanging around near the front door, but I didn’t get the impression that she minded all that much. At least after this my stomach felt much better.

The next day I’m well enough to drive in a car, so we head to Jaisalmer. My buddy from New Zealand said it was his favorite city in India, and some of the photos I had seen look amazing, so I had high expectations. I ended up being a little underwhelmed. I think the uncooperative weather had a lot to do with this. Jaisalmer is situated in the northwestern Indian desert, just 90 km from Pakistan. Its fort, along with just about all the other buildings in town, are made of the local sandstone, which blend into the desert background and supposedly achieve a golden glow when lit up by the dusk or the evening lights. Unfortunately, though, it’s overcast, rainy, foggy when I get there. This appears to have been my luck recently, showing up in the desert and getting rained on. So I think it may have ruined the appearance of what is otherwise a very atmospheric place.

By the next morning, I’m feeling close to 100%. About my only serious lingering effect is that I no longer have any appetite for the rich, spicy Indian curries I had previously been enjoying so much. I’m now getting by mostly on lassis, the western-style breakfasts which heretofore I wasn’t touching, and drier and less rich food like tandoori items with rice. I even feel good enough for the camel safari at this point. However, the weather is still lousy. It’s not raining, but is still overcast, foggy, and damp. After being sick for three days the last thing I’m interested in is freezing my ass off in the damp desert evening, but the forecast keeps saying it’s going to be sunny, so I go for it. Alas, this also doesn’t quite live up to expectations. I pictured myself being Lawrence of Arabia for a day, and instead it was more like a day at the petting zoo, after which I froze my ass off in the extremely damp and cold desert evening with the crappy, moisture-soaked blankets they provided. I did make some nice company while out there, there was an excellent dance performance in camp, and it was fun to get to ride a camel for an hour or so, but if I had to do it over again I would have just paid somebody to let me take an hour-long camel ride in Pushkar and then instead of spending the night in a hut with damp blankets that were fouled with camel shit, I could have spent it in a hotel with clean sheets and indoor plumbing. Maybe next time.

India is too damn photogenic

I forgot to realize that I had to create a second photo album for all the snaps I've been taking because I went over the 1000 photo limit on google photos already. You can see the rest here. There are some really good ones in there, including the Kumbhalgarh Fort and some ones I took on the road on the way there. The Rajasthan countryside between Udaipur and the fort is really beautiful, but unfortunately the photos I took from the car really don't do it justice. It's a semi-arid region that kind of reminds me of the mountain west, but with more exotic looking plants, and tons of fields of poppies in the valleys. Also be sure to look for the snaps of the two women carrying full-sized bales of hay on their heads.

Holy Hucksters

After Jaipur, I spent a day in Pushkar. It was a beautiful place, but it kind of got on my nerves. It’s another sacred place where people go to bathe in the waters around a small lake. It’s basically the same drill as Varanasi, but 10x cleaner. Unfortunately, the charm of the place was largely spoiled for me due to the ubiquitous scam artists posing as holy men around the lake that won’t leave you alone until you perform some ritual of throwing flowers petals into the lake, which of course they charge for. They then give you a red string tied around your wrist, so unfortunately you can’t claim to have already done it. I don’t think it would have amounted to all that much money, but I didn’t want to give these guys any money on principle. So to a large extent I minimized my time walking around the lake just to avoid them.

I’m sorry to report that this has been a persistent problem in India. Almost everywhere you go in the developing world you’re going to have drivers that try to grossly overcharge you for fares, people running gem import scams, touts, merchants that try to sell you overpriced face merchandise, tour operators that bring you into a craft shop to see the craft performed and you later end up being pressured to make a purchase for which they get a commission on, people begging in the street, service providers trying to run a bait-and-switch on you, etc. However, what goes on here in India is at a whole different level from anywhere else I’ve been. It seems as if almost everyone I meet at best has an ulterior motive for talking to me, and at worst is an outright thief. For every single interaction you have, you have to be working to anticipate the various ways that they are trying to scam you or setting you up for a scenario in which they will try to pressure you for money. This is really a shame, as it seriously undermines the all the other things which make the country so enjoyable. It also results in making genuine connections with people here extremely difficult.

Fortunately, my day in Pushkar was salvaged by the company I made. While walking around I met a couple Israeli women. We struck up a conversation, and ended up going to dinner together to a fantastic little dive place in the middle of town. We had the veg thali since they said it was the best in town (no meat is ever eaten in Pushkar due to the religious strictures here)(you can think of thali as the sampler platter). Not exactly the cleanest place I’ve ever been to as there were flies swarming around the kitchen and there was a layer of grime on everything, but it was fantastic, and the place had the kind of hole-in-the-wall charm I love and prices to match. $2.00 for thali with seconds, fresh-made chapatis, and chai). I think I paid for it a little the next morning in the form of some minor digestive issues, but luckily it passed pretty quickly and I was OK by the time we got back on the road.

The next morning we headed to Udaipur, stopping at Ajmer on the way. Ajmer was and interesting stop for two hours. I also had another fabulous lunch. It was chicken handi, a spicy chicken dish with a cream-based curry sauce with lots of peppers. I’m beginning to realize that you can’t really go wrong with food in this country.

You certainly can go wrong with service providers, however. When we arrived in Udaipur I was a little disappointed with the quality of the hotel which my tour provider had set me up with. It was clean, but very old and decayed looking. It had peeling paint and stains on the walls and ceilings, sheets with stains and holes in them, a cruddy looking bathroom with a leaking toilet so there was standing water on the floor and substandard plumbing, and a bed that was a rock. Given what I had paid I was expecting more. However, I wasn’t planning on being at the hotel aside from sleeping and showering, so I figured I’d just live with it.

That night, though, the bed turned out to be much more uncomfortable than I had anticipated, so much so that I wasn’t even able to get a full night’s sleep (not that it mattered all that much since I would have been prevented from sleeping in the early morning due to the noise, anyways). So I dropped an email to my tour provider to complain the next morning, at which point he immediately texts me back saying that I’m in the wrong hotel. Needless to say I’m surprised at this. When I purchased the driver and hotel package I was given a packet of vouchers for each hotel. At every hotel I then had a reservation, and at every one I was immediately asked to give them the voucher for the stay which specifies the hotel and is my proof of payment. However, starting a couple cities back my driver started handling all the vouchers, so I hadn’t even looked at the voucher for the past couple cities, so I had no idea what the hotel name on the voucher for Udaipur was. So I go to the front desk and ask to see the voucher. The guy working the desk, the same guy that checked me in the night before, says that my driver never gave it to him. I find this a little odd as this is my proof of payment and every other places we had been to had immediately asked for it. So I got back to my room to finish my workout and shower up. When I come back out, my driver is by the front desk. I ask both him and the clerk where the voucher is, and now the hotel guy says that it’s already been sent to the office. Leaving aside the fact that it’s only 9:30 AM, the guy had now changed his story. So it seems to me like he doesn’t want me to see the voucher.

My driver commences to apologize profusely. He says he was confused because the same people own both hotels, and that’s why he mistakenly took me to this one instead of the much nicer place I was supposed to be. I’m a little perplexed by this as I doubt the voucher would have been ambiguous as to where I was staying, although I can’t confirm this because I can’t get a hold of the voucher. The other part that doesn’t add up is that there should have been a reservation for me, and that the hotel should have realized we were in the wrong place when we arrived because I wouldn’t have had a reservation there. So there are some things that just don’t add up in the “oops, I accidentally took you to the wrong hotel” story.

Here, however, is the story that fits all the evidence: my driver was trying to scam me by taking me to a cheaper hotel. As he stated, both the dump I ended up at and the nicer place I was actually booked at were owned by the same people. He takes me to the dump knowing I wouldn’t know where I was actually supposed to be so I end up seriously overpaying for my crappy room (which was pre-paid), and now the room at the nice hotel is freed up for another guest. The hotel then brings in more $$$ equal to the cost difference between my lousy room and the nice one I was supposed to be in, and my driver gets a chunk of that back. And it would have worked had I not complained to the tour provider about the room. Further evidence to support this is the fact that I was unable to move to my originally booked hotel the next day because it was full. If they had open rooms there would be no point to moving me to the cheaper property, and it's evidence that they gave my room to someone else, despite the fact that I had a fully pre-paid reservation.

I was about 80-90% sure about this, but asked the tour provider to send me a scan of the carbon copy of the voucher he wrote for me. Sure enough, there is little ambiguity as to the name of the hotel I was supposed to be checking into. Please note the comment about scams above. I had expected that a hired driver would try to further profit from me by cross-selling me overprices tours, taking me to shops and restaurants where he gets a commission, etc., but I’m quite disheartened to find out that somebody I had come to think of as a friend was literally trying to take money out of my pocket.

So relations with the driver are pretty chilly at the moment. Believe it or not, he’s behaving as if he’s mad at me, which I think takes quite a bit of temerity. Not that I really care all that much—I’m not interested in chuming around with somebody that was trying to steal from me.

Once the hotel situation was sorted out and I was moved to another property, the day actually ended up being pretty nice. Udaipur is a really charming place. It’s actually the city where much of Octopussy was filmed. It has a huge palace on the likeside, and a couple more actually out in the middle of the lake. It’s obviously a much more wealthy city than any of the other places we’ve been. It’s also by far the cleanest. I spent the afternoon checking out the city and grabbed a much-needed glass of wine in a terrace on the lake (my first in 7 days, wine is pretty hard to come by here). After that I want to an area outside of town filled with cenotaphs, monuments erected in honor of deceased rules of Udaipur. It was an extremely photogenic place and spent a good 90 minutes just walking around and taking shots. It kind of reminded me of Recoleta Cemetary in Buenos Aires. At night I went to a dance performance that was absolutely fantastic, and grabbed another killer meal on the lakeside. It was this smokey mutton curry that is a Rajasthan regional specialty. I was a little curious as to how they would make a curry smokey (you obviously can’t grill it), but I found out when they brought it out. It came in a small covered metal pot that appeared to be its original cooking vessel. The waiter takes of the lid, and inside sitting on top of the curry is a large lump of smoldering hardwood charcoal sitting on top of a thick leaf to keep the ash from getting into the curry. And it lived up to the billing—it was definitely quite smokey. And good.

The next day we drove to Jodhpur, stopping by the temples in Ranakpur and the amazing Kubalgarh Fort along the way. Wasn’t much conversation in the car, but that was just fine by me. I’m wrapping up the post just now in Jodhpur. Seems like another place I’m really going to like. There are definitely no problems with the hotel, either. It’s a heritage hotel built in an old haveli, which is an Indian term for private mansion. It’s also situated right in the center of town, immediately underneath the fort. It’s also within walking distance of everything I want to do tomorrow, which is good as I won’t need to bother with my driver until we leave for Jaisalmer on Saturday. So it should hopefully be another good day tomorrow.

A word about creepy Indian men

One of the unique things about India is that many of the dudes here are quite willing to openly express their admiration for my physique. More often than not this comes if the form of indiscreet staring, but is sometimes also vocalized. Unfortunately, this not always done in an appropriately bro-tastic fashion, such as “Dude! You’re totally buff!” The complement is appreciated, but oftentimes it is expressed in a way that gives me the willies. The first time was worst. It was my first day in Delhi. At the Red Fort, I had a young twentyish man come up to me and sheepishly ask for a photo. It took me a moment to realize that he wasn’t asking me to take a photo of him, but that he instead wanted a photo with me. “Um, uh, sure” I say. He stands next to me, his friend takes a photo, and next thing I know literally a dozen other young guys show up asking for the same thing. The whole experience was a little surreal, and a bit awkward. But it was all OK up until one of the last guys grabbed a photo of me and says, “Ooooooooooh, you have a niiiiiiiiiiiiice, boooowdy!”, sounding disturbingly like Gollum from the Lord of the Rings films. This creeped me the fuck out. Not bro-tastic. Not bro-tastic at all.

I have become somewhat inured to this over the past 12 days. Usually, it’s a completely innocuous exclamation of “Nice muscle!” directed my way when I walk past some random guy on the street. This happens about 20-40 times a day (no exaggeration). Maybe about a half dozen times I day I’m asked if I work out, or am asked for workout tips, which I also have no problem with. I’ll also periodically get a “I like your body,” or a “I like you” (this latter one also gives me the heebie-jeebies, although I usually chalk it up to being simply a language issue). Then there’s my personal favorite, “Hey, James Bond!” Only about once or twice a day am I asked if somebody can take a photo with me. However, as with the Red Fort, these usually come in packs – when one is seen taking a photo with me, another 4 immediately come out of the woodwork for the same. I always accept, as I’d be quite a hypocrite to decline request for a photo given the amount of shots I take of the locals every day (done discreetly as possible, but usually without their consent). I then just pray that there won’t be any inappropriate, if inadvertent, homoerotic overtones to the conversation that will leave me feeling violated afterwards. Thankfully, there usually there isn’t. There was, of course, the guy in Khajuraho that upped the stakes by asking me if he had correctly guessed the size of my penis (not as completely out from left field as it might sound here since he was a tour guide we were just talking over lunch about the philosophical context of the erotic sculptures in the temples there, but still definitely not bro-tastic).

It would certainly be refreshing if I got a “Nice muscle” or an “I like your body” from a female for once. Alas, it’s only the guys that are telling me how much they like my pecs. The ladies are mum on the subject.

Jaipur

Just got done with Jaipur. It's called the "pink city" because the majority of the buildings are painted pink by tradition (actually more of a salmon color). I missed a couple of the city highlights there because I didn't manage my time very well. Because I worked out in the morning I got a bit of a late start on the day. I first went to the large fort in Amber in the hills overlooking the city, which was definitely the highlight, sights-wise. After that I came back to the city and I headed out for lunch and to see the sites. Realizing I was low on cash, I blew 45 minutes looking for an ATM. After that I spent another 40 minutes or so looking for the restaurant I was searching out. It was well worth the time investment, though. It was this atmospheric little mom-and-pop hole in the wall on the city wall, and it had fantastic food. The garlic naan there was phenomenal, and the house specialty, a paneer curry with a yellow-brown sauce with vegetables, was absolutely fantastic. I also met a couple interesting fellow travelers there, an older American woman that has been teaching in an international school in Paris for the past 40 years, and a young guy from New Zealand. This stretched out my late lunch even more, though, so by the time I started walking around the city and seeing sights, everything was closed. However, I'm not particularly bent out of shape about it, as I was able to get the feel for the city and saw the fort, which I think is probably the most interesting part.

Since it was a weekend evening, later that night I caught up with the guy from New Zealand with the intent of meeting some nice charming young ladies out. We went to a restaurant which we were told had a nice bar and may have a good scene, but it was dead. After that we sought out a night club we thought someone had recommended. I say "thought" because there obviously was some kind of misunderstanding, when we arrived at the place we saw that it was not in fact a night club, but a cricket club. It was closed, and definitely had neither tasty cocktails nor charming company. After that we went to plan C, which was to check out a lounge located in a fancy hotel in a former palace. Rooms there started at $350/night and ran up well into the thousands, so drinks were likely going to be pretty pricey, but I was more than willing to cough up some cash for a little decent nightlife at this point. So we catch up tuk-tuk up there (we couldn't find any taxis), wanting to get dropped off a couple hunderd yards from the entrance as we thought the staff there wouldn't look very kindly upon a couple young, single guys showing up in a golf cart. Unfortunately, the tuk-tuk driver didn't speak any English, so he rolled us right up to the front gate of the resort for our grand ghetto-style entrance. Somewhat embarrassed, I get out of the car, walk up, and ask if the lounge is still open. Of course, I'm told that it's not. I'm not sure if that was actually case or if they just didn't want us mixing with the clientele that was paying $800/night for a room, but I guess it really didn't make any difference. Out of options at this point, I pack up and head back to the hotel for some shut-eye so I can get ready before heading to Pushkar tomorrow.

No, I’m not dead

I’m just busy. I’ve had so little free time at the start of the trip that I haven’t had time to write a post. Deal with it. So I’m writing this one a little after the fact. A big part of the problem I’ve had is related to the fact that I’ve had to spend most of my free time making plans for the latter part of my trip. I also haven’t had as much time to spend on the computer since my first couple travel connections were flights, which didn’t leave me much train/car/bus time to kill.

So Delhi was worth a brief stop, but it wasn’t exactly my favorite travel destination. It had a couple nice historic sites downtown, including a medieval fort and a massive mosque built by the same crew. I also rolled through the area of town with India’s national monuments, major government buildings, and the president’s house. By far and away the highlight of Delhi, though, was a tomb of one of the ancient Mughal Emperors. It was very atmospheric, and I was able to get some great photographs (great by my standards, at any rate).

There were definitely some things about Delhi that I didn’t like. First of all, it’s the most polluted place I’ve ever been in my life. Right after getting picked up at the airport by a driver from my hotel, I asked him if there was a fire nearby because there was a noticeable acrid smell in the air and there was a thick smoke-like haze everywhere. No fire, that’s just how the air is. To be fair, it’s particularly bad out by the airport as the area is basically a plantless dust-bowl, but everywhere I went there was a thick haze in the air. On my flight leaving Delhi a couple days later I get in a conversation with a Chinese woman from Beijing, and she actually mentioned what a problem it was. If you’ve got somebody from urban China complaining about the pollution and smog, you know you’ve got a problem.

Delhi was also pretty sprawling. It’s not very tourist-friendly, without a small, walkable core to it. I suppose a certain amount of sprawl may be inevitable in a city of 13 million people, though. It’s not as if the population density wasn’t high. The concentration and sheer mass of humanity packed into the streets in the area I was staying in was shocking. This is probably partially my fault, though. I picked a hotel that was described in reviews as being located “at the end of a long, dark alley situated in the middle of a slum”. At the time I chalked this up to people being prissy, insulated little whiners that haven’t ever traveled to the developing world. At least in this case, though, they were absolutely right. The “street” we were located off of was basically a big dusty, dirt track lined with small concrete block shacks with corrugated metal roofs, or in many cases just corrugated metal walls, as well. Off this you then had to walk about 40 yards into a side alley which at many points was no wider than 4 or 5 feet across to get to the hotel. I would not have thought it possible to get that much dust and dirt in an urban environment with so many people. Ironically, I actually liked the hotel. The rooms were decent, the staff was helpful, and the building was quiet, and they had great food. It was just in a horrid location. Being there actually gave a fascinating look into the life of India’s urban poor. This neighborhood had crappy back-alleys off of back-alleys that seemed to go on forever, with legit looking businesses and people’s homes tucked into them. It’s as if there’s an entire hidden world in these crevices and crannies hidden from the streets.

This environment was just a block or two away from two of the city’s most significant sites, the Jama Masjid Mosque and the Red Fort. I wanted to stay there partially because I did want to be able to walk to as much of the things I wanted to visit as possible. I didn’t spend too much time outside the hotel, though. Even once you got outside of the serious slum area I was in, it was still pretty seedy. There was a market just to the north of me, but navigating the crush of people there was so difficult, and the area was sketchy enough that even I needed to seek refuge back in the hotel. This is saying something as I often enjoy seeing the seedy underbelly of places I go, and am generally able to shrug off conditions in cities I travel to that people would find appalling back home.

The squalor I experienced in Delhi was just about made up for by the quality of the food. There was a renowned restaurant just a few blocks from me that I hit on Saturday. All I can say is “wow”. The food there was almost unbelievably good. I had mutton burra, a kind of barbecued mutton (although I actually think it was goat), aloo gosht, a rich goat brown curry with potatoes, and sahi paneer, a cream and tomato based curry made with paneer, the ubiquitous . I didn’t recognize it by name, but when I came out I realized the shahi paneer was something I’ve had many times before at Indian restaurants in the US. Normally, it doesn’t turn my crank all that much. At this place I damn near licked the bowl clean, despite the fact that I had ordered two full entrée-sized portions of food. The other items were equally as good. The total cost for this feast ended up being around $5. (Incidentally, this place wasn’t in the full-blown slum with the men bathing themselves on the sidewalk and homeless cripples and midgets laying around on the street, it was just in the adjacent semi-slum with the stores with piles of decapitated goat heads out front) (I think one of those goats ended up in my food, by the way). And while this place was definitely the standout for food, the other places I ate at didn’t disappoint either. Even my hotel (in the alleyway in the middle of the slum) had great food.

I don’t want to give the impression that all of Delhi was so shockingly desperate. Many parts of it are relatively nice, it’s just not where I ended up.

While the food was great, the nightlife was a bit of a bust for me. I was there on a Saturday night, so I had high expectations for going out and meeting some pretty Indian girls. Most of the nice clubs are in the high-end hotels in the city. One of the guys from my hotel recommended one, so I threw on the set of nice duds I brought and headed out. Upon arriving, I saw a fancy, modern hotel, with a swank looking club on the first floor, and some rather attractive ladies walking in that were no doubt representatives of the moneyed Indian upper class. This was all rather promising, so I head in. I get to the door, and the host asks me “Are you a guest in this hotel?”. “No”, I tell him, at which point he informs me that the cover charge is 4000 rupees. I do the math in my head, and thinking that can’t possibly be right, pull out my phone and use the calculator to confirm that yes, this clown just asked me for $90 US to get into the club. Based on the cost of living and relative purchase power, this would be like being asked for $450 to get into a place in the US. Thinking I don’t need to spend that kind of money to go in and feel awkward because I don’t fit in with the crowd and being resentful because I know I never would have been asked for such an outrageous sum if I were either female or not a foreigner, I decline, head back to the hotel, watch a bit of Indian MTV, and go to bed. This of course reminds that I actually hate night clubs and how much I despise the bullshit at them, regardless of in what part of the world they’re located.

One of the things I was able to polish up in Delhi was the plans for the rest of my trip. I booked two flights to get me to my next two cities, and then arranged for a private driver to take me the rest of the way. Being by myself, the driver was a bit of a splurge, but should be worth it. I’ll get to cover a lot more territory in my time, and will have lots more flexibility. It will also allow me to spend my time experiencing the places I’m at, instead of trying to figure out train and bus schedules every single night. As part of the package I also had the tour operator who set me up with the driver pre-book all my hotels up until the 17th when I finish with the driver, so the rest of the trip will hopefully be hassle-free. Here’s the schedule:

Day 1-2: Delhi
Day 3-4: Varanasi (with day trip to xxxuusdfklsj )
Day 5: Khajuraho; get picked up by driver
Day 6: Orccha
Day 7: Agra; Fathepur Sikri
Day 8-9: Jaipur
Day 10: Pushkar
Day 11-12: Udaipur
Day 13-14: Jodhpur
Day 15-16: Jaisalmer
Day 17: Bikaner
Day 18: Mandawa
Day 19: Delhi
Day 20-21: Hyderabad
Day 22: fly back to Delhi, catch one last Indian meal, fly home

So next it was on to Varanasi. This is a holy city for Hindus, who believe that they can be purified by bathing in the river waters, and that someone who dies there can also be freed from the continual cycle of death and reincarnation central to their religion. In addition, many people are cremated along the holy river there for reasons which escape me and I’m too lazy to look up at the moment. So you can walk along the river and see some startlingly intimate portions of people’s lives going on: people performing their ritualistic bathing in the river, public cremations on wooden pyres in full view of anyone passing by, and nightly outdoor religious ceremonies. All this sacred activity is going on intermixed with the completely mundane activities also going on along or in the river: people watering their goats and cows, doing laundry, kids flying kites and playing cricket, etc.

I’ve traveled an awful lot, but it must be said the Varanasi was completely unlike any other place I’ve ever been. Just really amazing. In addition to all the aforementioned highlights, one of the most charming and simultaneously repulsive aspects to the city was the intermingling of animals with the people in the urban environment. While not the cheek-to-jowl setup of Delhi, it’s still very densely populated, and in this environment it seems every third person is keeping a cow or a small pack of goats. There are no fields for these cows or goats, they’re literally just living out in the streets, in the back alleys, or in the steps along the river (called ghats) where people bathe, wash their clothes, and cremate their dead. So it’s charming because, well, how can it not be? It cracked me up to be driving around in traffic in the middle of the city waiting for a herd of cattle to get out of the way. And it’s repulsive because, as you can probably imagine, the city is inundated with shit (literally). There really isn’t any trash pick-up, so the animals do their business, and there it stays. This is particularly true of the most touristic areas along the river. There’s one main road that runs parallel to the river, about 60-70 yards away. To get to the river (and most likely your guest house), you have to navigate a mass of tiny back alleys crammed with homes, small shops, guest houses for the religious Hindu visitors, and craft shops (silk weaving is apparently big business in Varanasi). Many of the residents in this area keep their own sacred cows, and many that don’t bring their cows and goats through there to get to the river. So I found it to be incredibly quaint to have to step over a lounging 1200 pound brahmin bull to get to my hotel, but at the same town was absolutely disgusted by the amount of feces lying around. And the people there were extremely nonchalant about it. Women would clean their laundy, then lay it out to dry on the same ghat steps that the animals are continually shitting all over. Guys are just sitting around on the steps along the river (ugh). I didn’t even want to think about the amount of goat crap on the cricket ball the kids were playing with. And of course, all this runs off into the river which may of the locals and Hindu visitors are bathing in. I did my damnedest to not touch anything or anyone the entire time I was there. Being both a city boy and a non-dog-owner, I’ve got serious issues with animal feces, and felt filthy the entire time I was in Varanasi, and continued to do so until I arrive at my next location, washed every single item of clothing I had work during that time as well as my jacket, cleaned my shoes, wiped down my bags and everything else I was carrying (including my laptop, cell phone, and all other personal belongings). It was a fascinating place and definitely worth going to, but if I come back I think it’s going to be in a head-to-toe gore-tex suit with a gas mask. Either that, or stay in a hotel that whenever someone enters they are stripped naked, have their clothes incinerated, and a given a jail-house style power spray wash and fresh clothing before they are allowed in.

After Varanasi I caught a flight to Khajuraho. It’s a city in central India with a large cluster of Hindu temples covered in incredibly intricate sculptures. The recurrent themes in the sculptures are Hindu religious images, women, and sex (or as the non-English speaking caretakers of the temples say when they point at them “Kama Sutra, Kama Sutra”). While the erotic content was amusing (there were some particularly acrobatic scenes depicted in some cases), the sculptures were also great art. And while the architecture there was amazing, I also loved Khajuraho because it was clean-ish. There was still an awful lot of dirt in the air, and while there are still cows and goats roaming the streets most everywhere you go, the levels of dirt and shit were tolerable. I think this will be much more representative of much of India. Enough animals wandering around through traffic to be cute, but not so many that you feel like your entire body is coated with a thin film of cowpie every time you come back from being outside. Thank god. Apparently, the amount of cows in Varanasi is particularly large because of its religious significance there.

At Khajuraho I hooked up with my driver and we headed to Orccha. It’s a small town with a massive fort, a set of medieval palaces, huge Hindu temple, and other associated historical structures. I really liked this place. All the buildings were amazing, particularly the large Hindu temple. It was almost like visiting the zoo. It had a bunch of monkeys hanging around on the roof, a vulture and it’s new offspring perched along the dome, a large bright green parrot zipping around the upper parts, and a bunch of bats that were living in the dark underside of the ancient stone dome. A young Indian guy was able to let me into the locked door leading to the interconnected sets of hidden halls and stairwells in the building to lead me up there. He hustled me for an exorbitant tip at the end, but it was well worth it to see the menagerie in the building and to get some fantastic shots of the other buildings in the town from the roof, including one of me feeding the monkeys on the rooftop. I also scored some amazing street food in Orccha. It was called aloo something-or-other, unfortunately I can’t remember. Essentially, it was a deep-fried crushed potato, which was then stir-fried with some onion, cilantro, some kind of soupy brown beans or lentils, garam masala and other seasonings, and served with a mango and tamarind sauce in a bowl make out of two large tree-leaves formed into a bowl using toothpicks. Killer.

After Orccha, it was on to Agra. I saw a certain building there which you likely have heard of. It didn’t disappoint. Be sure to check out the photos when they are up (taking a while as I have yet to stay at a hotel with functioning internet in my room). As I write this post I’m on the way to Jaipur. I’ll try to post more regularly going forward. Now that I’ve got a driver, I should have 2-3 hours of car time every couple days which should allow me to keep up. Cheers.