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.