Motorcycle Trip in India!

Wow it is like a dream come true - we rented a motorcycle and drove it into the country. It was a little 100cc bike, a TVS Star; just a tiny thing really but it could do 40kph comfortably.

So we started off from Udaipur and made our way north to Ranakpur, where we saw a massive Jain temple. It was a huge affair, and we rode the bike into a parking lot and changed into our flip-flops (us being experienced temple visitors we know that it is customary to remove footwear before entering). The main temple is made entirely of marble, is three stories high and has 1444 intricately, uniquely carved columns inside. Not just that, but the temple is open to the air on each level, and not just windows but huge swaths of open space - the great domes themselves create spaces that span all three floors. It is just tremendous.

We stayed at a place called the Roopam Hotel in Ranakpur. It was nice and cheap, and we were very pleased to have somewhere to put our heads that wasn't a tent.

The next morning we woke up and with our boiled eggs stowed safely away (for a later snack) we headed for Kumbhalghar. But wait a minute, I'm making all of this sound too easy. Motorcycling in India isn't actually hard, but there are some rules to pay attention to that aren't the same in the west.

1. most roads are one lane, with rocky/sandy/muddy shoulders
2. the biggest vehicle always has the right of way
3. big vehicles are usually nice and give motorcycles time to get out of the way (they don't like the smears on the windshield)
4. if you are overtaking a car, you honk
5. if you are overtaking a motorcycle, you honk
6. if you are overtaking a bicycle, you honk
7. if you are overtaking a pedestrian, you honk
8. if you are overtaking a cow, goat, sheep or dog, you honk and go slowly
9. if you are approaching a blind corner or hill, you honk
10. it is apparently okay to pass people on blind corners or hills, except when honking is heard from opposing traffic (see rule 4)
11. when an oncoming car flashes its lights, it means it is not stopping so get the hell out of the way
12. little kids will sometimes yell "namaste" (Hello/Goodbye) or "Tata" (Goodbye)
13. little kids will sometimes throw things at you

Navigation is a bit of a challenge, because 95% of all traffic signs are in Hindi, and I only know the characters for these letters: B, R, F. Thankfully we were going to "R"anakpur the first day, and then back to Udaipu"R" the second day. :) People are pretty helpful on the road, sometimes I would just slow down and shout "Udaipur?" and they would laugh and point where I was supposed to go.

So we were going to Kumbalgarh the next day. It was a fantastic ride, the bike performed well (at 40kph, sometimes 50 if we went downhill) and when we go to the fort our jaws just dropped. This was the biggest, hugest, most massive fort we have ever seen. The ramparts go on for 36km around the countryside, the wall itself was constructed around 1450. The palace that tops the mountain was built around 1850 and they call it the Cloud Palace, because during monsoons it sits in the clouds. Walking around we saw some tremendous views, and there was even a marching band...as always.

India Motorcycles: Ranakpur and Kumbalgarh

We were riding through the country, and we saw some beautiful countryside as this part of India gets some rain, as opposed to Jaisalmer that hasn't seen a drop of rain in 5 years. Something neat was water wheels, driven by some form of beast (cow, bull, buffalo) and a huge set of gears that pulls water out of a well and into a trough. On a related note (to the beasts) the country people have devised some use for cow dung as they collect it, pat it onto rocks for it to dry, and then pile it up into tall towers of these brown cakes. One day I will learn the true purpose, but I suspect it is for fuel.

Lastly, pretty much everyone out here waved at us, shouted at us, said "namaste/tata". A couple boys did some weird dancing as we rode by, one waggled his ass into the road, and not just a few kids (mostly girls) threw things at us. One old man threw both arms up into the air and waved them about in some kind of a dance, I guess he was happy to see us!

When we got back to Udaipur we wanted to drop off the bike, but there was some kind of huge parade and the entire center of town was blocked off with thousands and thousands of people. We nearly got trampled but a nice woman took pity on us poor confused tourists and held Leah against the wall while the throngs of people flowed past. What a weird night, I have no idea what the parade was for but they had these huge floats that were probably 40 feet high, it reminded Leah of the marshmallow man in Ghostbusters just trundling down the streets as the floats careened from one side to the other.

We're off to Bangalore tomorrow!

Udaipur - The White City

We had lots of fun here, first arriving at about 5am after a night-bus. We took a SLEEPER bus which I think would totally catch on in Canada, although here in India the roads are made up more of potholes than pavement so sleeping is somewhat of a misnomer. Our tour book said that this is called the white city because of the white-wash they use on the buildings, and you can definitely see that from the Monsoon Palace on the hill.

We've only been here for two days and already I feel like I live here. :) This is a fun little town and there is a RIVER of water, compared to the parched city of Jaisalmer that we just came from. Today we hired a rickshaw driver to take us around the tourist sites - you can see some of my pictures here:

Udaipur, India

So that's it for now, we're planning to rent a motorcycle tomorrow and drive into the country to see another fort, and maybe some more Jain temples. We have our train and plane tickets to get us to Bangalore on the 1st of February, and we can start the southern part of our Indian adventure.

I'll drop in again soon!

Jaisalmer; Gateway to the great Thar Desert

Yes we went on a camel safari and it was fantastic. :) Here are pictures:

Camel Safari

As a side note Jaisalmer puts itself forward as the Golden city, but this is neither here nor there because as far as I can tell that is just the colour of the soil-based plaster they use on the outside walls. Nonetheless, it does have a golden hue when seen at sunset from the aptly named Jaisalmer Fort.

We arrived at 5am from the night train (third class A/C sleeper car) and were snatched up by the offer of a cheap ride to a hotel at 5am when the air was veeerrry cold. We went right to sleep and woke up at around 11am to figure out what kind of a camel tour we would do. We interviewed a few post-tourists, and talked to three different outfits and eventually settled on the renowned Mr Desert.

All was settled, and we were at the Sahara Travels booth at 9am for our camel safari. First thing was a jeep ride into the desert, our driver's name was Leeloo and he immediately liked Leah, because apparently their names mean the same thing in Hindi - a gift! We popped into a Jain temple that had been reclaimed as Hindu, and then we were on a one hour ride into the real desert. We passed by a few very humble villages on the way.

The camels were not very comfortable at first, although by the second day I became quite accustomed to the extremely accentuated sway of their walk. My camel's name was Pallo, and Leah rode Johnny. We had two guides who rode the other camel. These guys did everything for us, they cooked lunch which was rice, some spicy goulash of some kind and fresh chapatis. We were totally stuffed because they wouldn't let us get away without eating pretty much everything they made, which was loads.

During the day we just sat on the camels taking in the visual expanse of desert, sometimes covered in hardy plants, and sometimes barren dunes. At night we slept in the dunes, on the sand. Unfortunately this kindof sucked because the sand was really hard and we were very uncomfortable. In hindsight, I would have asked for more blankets and just loaded them up on the ground before we crashed. Mr. Desert's mom sent a home-cooked Indian meal to us which was very filling although I don't have any idea what it was (except for two spicy eggplants)
because it was so dark.

The next day we packed up and headed back into civilization. In the morning they had the camels gallop, which was not comfortable at all but by the afternoon it was too hot for that so we just walked and I tried to regain what composure I had. After it was all said and done, Leeloo picked us up and drove us to Karnataka, an abandoned village, one of 84 that were completely abandoned all at the same time over 350 years ago.

Karnataka and the other 84 villages were populated entirely by the Brahmans, the holy caste of Indian society. The story goes that India's Prime Minister at the time was a very bad man, and he seized power from the local Maharajah by killing all of his key supporters. Once he had local power, he used it to extort beautiful women from the villages, and when he walked into Karnataka he saw the leader's beautiful daughter and decided he wanted to marry her. After his negotiations failed, the town met and decided that knowing his behavior and that he would take the daughter by force the entire town and all their friends in the other 84 villages left on the same day and moved out of Rajasthan entirely - never to return.

When we got back to Jaisalmer, we found a great little place called the Jeet Mahal hotel and it was the prettiest, most Indian hotel we have stayed at yet - and just Ru 300! This is middle of the road for us, I think we spent Ru 550 one night and as little as Ru 150 some nights.

Jaisalmer, India

The next morning our hotel manager convinced us to go to this local pavilion that had girls dancing in traditional outfits, and to our surprise they had a series of floats that went by, some of them celebrating Indian successes, some humorously showing the differences between our ways of life, and some pushing ideas like recycling and other social ideas. Quite a neat event - the pics are above!

Jodhpur: The Blue City

Hey everyone. I haven't had a chance to make any posts in a while because we've been really busy, with camels and all that. But to catch up, I think I'll go chronologically. This post is about Jodphur, which roughly translates to Jodah's City. It was founded ages ago, but really I'm not here to give a history lesson, I'm here to tell you what we did.

We stayed at a cool little place called the Krishna Pasham Haveli (or something like that, they just called it the KP Haveli). This was a totally remodeled Haveli (hindi for mansion house) and it was lovely inside, and since it was sitting just at the base of the fort we had a great view of the fort at night, and during the day. Right across from the KP Haveli was a little convenience store and the guys in there we really cool, they helped us figure out what to do and were generally the kind of people that make India great. :)

The first thing we did in Jodhpur, was get our bearings by walking around and shopping. Jodhpur is full of loads of cool little shops that have all kinds of useless Indian trinkets, which we have loaded up on. We've now sent three packages home to Leah's sister, who has no idea they're arriving and who will have to go pick them up from the post office. Just a few minutes from our haveli is the clock tower market, which is this insane madness of people, rickshaws motorcycles and people just laying their wares willy nilly all over the place.This is India. :)

There aren't really many restaurants in Jodhpur but we found a good (and cheap) one by recommendation at the Hotel Priya. Right across the street was a Softy and Softy ice cream shop that we went back to a couple times. The choco-dip was great!

Altogether I think people come to Jodhpur to see Merangarh Fort, a sprawling stone fort built on this huge rocky edifice in the middle of the desert. It is quite a site to see, so here you go:

Jodhpur and Merangarh Fort

The entire fort has been transformed into a museum, so we just followed the audio tour around. It was very good as far as audio tours go, and it was nice that there weren't people crowding around information placards trying to read about this stuff, we just listened as we walked.

You can see why they call this the blue city in some of the pictures, it is pretty cool to see so many houses painted the same way. Apparently they do this because blue helps cooling the walls, and it acts as an insect deterrent. I guess they would know!

We also walked around to the back of the fort, where there weren't any tourists. I guess there wasn't anything noteworthy on the audio tour, but I thought it was pretty cool walking around the parapets and seeing where the cannons were mounted.

We also tried to send a parcel from Jodhpur which was much more complicated than sending from Jaipur where it was so easy. Because of this, we hauled our package from Jodhpur to Jaisalmer, and then to Udaipur where we have just sent it off.

That's it!

pw

Pushkar, India

Pushkar is a holy village, surrounding a holy lake. This little town has sprung up into a very active tourist spot, it being so popular that the town officials have taken to examining passports to make sure people don't stay longer than three months.

Pushkar

It is hard to say why it has become so popular for long-time tourists, but its short term appeal is apparent in all the temples, probably over thirty of them that surround this holy lake. We saw it as the sun was setting and casting a reddish light over the lake temples.

That's the nice thing about Pushkar. The not so nice bit is that it is a little town over-run with long-term tourists. I hate to pinpoint a certain type of person, but it seems that there is some draw that brings the hippiest of folks here to stay. There are dredlocks at all angles, and everywhere there are tourists wearing baggy (undoubtedly very comfortable) clothes that only Indian priests wear.

The tourist attention means that the always attendant street vendors are not so hungry for our business, and this has two effects. First, they don't hassle us nearly as much. Second, they are very resistant to haggling - which is unfortunate because we're just coming into our own with this valuable skill.

The tourist attention has also created a weirder still side economy - that of the local religion. Men on the street approach us, and give us flowers which we are to throw in the lake. This wouldn't be so bad, but we have been warned that they will bully tourists into making 'huge' donations for the effort. Since we knew ahead of time, we avoided these people as much as possible, but one set of touts managed to slip these pretty little flowers into our hands. When it became clear that we weren't planning on dropping them in the lake they became angry and demanded the flowers back. We didn't intend any insult to the Hindu tradition, we just didn't want to participate like that - but these guys took it the wrong way and shouted at us as we walked away "why did you come to pushkar?!?"

Altogether the verdict is: full of tourists, expensive, and obnoxious religious touts. My vote is to stay away from Pushkar.

There is one caveat to this, and that is if you're interested in learning to become Indian. Everywhere there are places to learn to paint like the Indians, to dance like the Indians and even to absorb weird superstitious healing practices like the Indians. We saw spray paintings on the walls like "Aids is curable" through yogic medicines. If this is your bag, then Pushkar is where it's at!

Thoughts on standing in line in India

Standing in line is the bread and butter of the West. In the land where everyone is legally, if not socially equal we seem to feel that in almost every situation that standing in line is a pretty good way to fairly allocate whatever is given out.

India disagrees. India thinks that everyone pressing around whatever they're after is a good idea. India thinks that the noisiest, and pushiest person should get what they want - even if what they want is to get a good seat on the bus.

India favours the bold. India thinks that in traffic if you're in front of someone else you have the right of way - therefore everyone struggles to get in front. This applies both for pedestrians walking in traffic or for vehicles merging into traffic even if it's going much slower than everyone else. India thinks that if there is a narrow road it makes the most sense to just go into whatever bottleneck with little thought to how this bottleneck might best be sorted out.

India thinks that if you honk your horn you have the right of way. India thinks that bicycles don't need bells, the drivers of bicycles just need to make a weird "chht chht" sound that sounds more like a body being slowly dragged behind you than a bicycle that wants to get past.

My new Rolex in Jaipur, India

Jaipur is in the province of Rajasthan, and today is our second day here. We took a very uncomfortable overnight bus to Mumbai, and then flew here yesterday. When our flight finally got here after being delayed for 3 hours (it is a 1.5hour flight) we were exhausted and went straight to sleep.

Thankfully today was a day full of happy goodness. I'm not sure what that means, but I think it's because I'm comfortably stuffed from curry - we just ate dinner at a restaurant called Saffire and they fed us until we nearly popped. We're staying at this REALLY nice place called the Sunder Palace, it is a beautiful little hotel; the room is clean, the sheets are clean, no hint of stinkyness anywhere. Also the hotel staff is really nice and very helpful. Just my 2c.

We had this idea that we would buy stuff in Jaipur, and I think we succeeded in this. Walking towards the walled 'pink city' we had to jump around auto-rickshaws and bicycle rickshaws and cows. The city is actually pink, apparently from the terracotta plaster they use here. There is a huge gate-building but the gate is quite small for the amount of traffic that goes through, and Indian driving rules don't really handle congested spaces very well - so there was this huge traffic jam as all manner of vehicles are trying to get through the gate at the same time.

Once in the pink city we're assaulted with smells of food, exhaust, and occaisionally cow and gross stinky sewer smells. Visually the city is stunning, from the pink walls, to the white tower that soars above the markets, right down to the bright colours of all the stuff people are selling. They had huge HUGE bags of chilli peppers, and sacks full of what we guessed was probably spices of some kind, but it's all just ground down and they make little mountains of it. And the textile vendors have an astounding variety of colours and textures they're selling.

We got to see some of this up close, because we decided that we needed a few things to keep us warm. I got myself a wool blanket, and we got two wool shawls. One is more of a man-shawl but I haven't worn it in public yet - although lots of the local guys wear these things.
We bought a bunch of other crap, so far I've spent about $100 on myself.

That's it for now. I'd post pictures but I'm so stuffed I can barely move. Next time. I mean it.

pw

Good things and bad things

There are lots of great and wonderful things about India. And there are some things that suck. Here is a list:

Good things:

• cute kids that wave and say Hello
• cute kids that wave, say Hello and want a picture so they can see themselves on the LCD screen of your camera
• cute kids that wave, say Hello, want a picture with you and all their friends
• an old lady who wanted a picture with Leah, and then gave Leah a high-five!
• astonishing sculpted cave temples - carved out of the rock
• the food is amazing and cheap!
• friendly people that go out of their way to help us
• Shake the rickshaw driver who took us around the caves in Aurangabad and helped us negotiate prices from the roadside fruit vendors
• groups of girls are always friendly, smiley and they giggle when we wave and say "namaste"
• the fact that we are rockstars here, and everyone wants to talk to us (Hello where you from whats your name)

Bad things:

• cute kids that don't leave you alone, and chase you down the block (basically every group of boys)
  
• people with acute staring disease
• creepy men who sit a reasonable distance away and then stare unabashedly
• weird people who video tape us as we walk around
• weird people who ostensibly take pictures of their friends, when they're clearly framing the shot around us
• raw sewage
• sewer gas in the hotel
• touts that try to sell us garbage, and don't leave us alone when we don't want it
• rickshaw drivers that overcharge. every time.
• taxi drivers that overcharge. every time.
• people throw garbage everywhere
• men consider India a large-ish urinal and feel they can pee anywhere, at any time
• most toilets do not have toilet paper (of course) but they also don't have a little squirt gun, just a water bucket

India Trip

Hey everybody!

I am in Mumbai today - but first a quick background. I decided to go to India sometime in early January - and so Leah and I flew to Mumbai on Jan 10th. It has all been a bit rushed but that's the best way I think.

Mumbai, India

So we've been here for 5 days, we just arrived this morning on a night-bus. We wanted to take a sleeper train, but it was full, and then we wanted a sleeper bus, but it was full so we had to settle on a chair bus. Leah had a really hard time sleeping, but since Kimberly had prescribed us a sleeping pill I was able to get some rest. The roads were just terrible, with the bumping and the lurching and the braking and honking while we slept. Altogether it was "interesting and adventurous". I guess that's what we're here for! :)

Yesterday on the 16th we were in Aurangabad. This is medium sized city with a few good resturants. We discovered two that were outstanding - Smile at the Nirala Bazaar, and Prashant which is just down the road from the train station. We stayed at the Hotel Shree Maya, with Kimberly who had been there a couple days ahead so we could meet up. Kim was an immense help in getting us acclimatized to the nature of life and culture in India; she is also quite a hoot to have around so we were all laughing it up as we wandered around Aurangabad, and the caves.

Aurangabad, India

The 14th and 15th we went to see the main attraction of Aurangabad, the Ajanta and Ellora caves. These are monolithic temples carved right out of the mountain. It is absolutely tremendous to see these - some of these temples were carved from the early days of Hinduism, Buddhism and the Jains, anywhere from 300-1000AD. In Ajanta, some of the original paint remains and the skill of the artists far outweighs pre-renaissance paintings in Europe; these guys knew how to create perspective and the illusion on depth! In Ellora, many of the caves were carved by the Jains who were masters of fine detail in their art. It is hard to believe that all of those temples were carved directly from the mountain, no assembly required!

Ajanta Caves

Ellora Caves and Daulatabad Fort

We had a very uneventful night-train from Mumbai to Aurangabad in the first place - we took a second class A/C car and it was reasonably comfortable. Only a few bugs, and I wouldn't eat off the floor but altogether it was just fine. I have to say that the flights from Seattle to Mumbai left something to be desired, but we were stuck with them so we had to suck it up and be happy. :) I had a hard time sleeping, so I tried some Nytol (non-prescription sleeping pills) but they just made me tired and not sleepy - and on top of it they gave me restless-legs. Damn that sucked - no more Nytol for me.

Mumbai, India

Back at the beginning, Carl and Kristy gave us a ride from Vancouver to Seattle. Thanks! :)

pw

Edited Jan 21st to add links to the photo albums