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.