On the 12th I spent my last morning in Pushkar on the roof of my hotel having a leisurely breakfast in the sun. It was a little difficult to leave as I enjoyed being in a small town and in a comfortable hotel with congenial management and fellow tourists. But I left on the 11 am bus heading north, for Nagaur. We passed through plowed but not yet sprouting fields, with trees here and there in the dry countryside and camel carts along the way. At Merta, about an hour and a half from Pushkar, I was told I had to board another bus for Nagaur that was just leaving. It was crammed full with passengers. The ticket guy told me to put my pack in the compartment in the back and climb onto the roof and that I could get a seat at the next town five or ten kilometers away. I climbed on top and joined three others who gave me a sort of dubious look. It wasn't uncomfortable, though it was cold in the wind despite the sunshine once we got going. Not many got off at the next town and about 20 men and boys joined us on the roof. I traveled that way for about an hour through the dry countryside. Just before another town the police made us all get down off of the roof and into the bus, and I got a seat once the passengers thinned out in the town.
I arrived in Nagaur about 3, quickly got a hotel and took an autorickshaw to the massive fort in the town. I spent a couple of hours there, the first hour or so on a tour (just me and the guide) that was very informative. He told me he gets only about 40 tourists a day, few of them foreigners. I saw no other foreigners while I was in Nagaur. He took me through the four palaces inside the fort, the earliest from the 16th century, I think. In any event, it is named after Akbar who spent 53 days there in 1570. There are three subsequently-built palaces, the latest from the 18th century. They are not big, but beautifully designed, with some colorful paintings on some of the walls, plus lots of niches for oil lamps. The fort also had quite an ingenious water system. It is a very large fort, 37 acres, with walls over a mile in total length and massive gates. I walked back to my hotel, stopping off at the bus station, where friendly people invited me to have tea with them and asked me to take their pictures. It was a relatively quiet town, of about 100,000 people. I had a not very good thali dinner at the hotel.
It felt cold the next morning. A lot of people on the streets had blankets wrapped around them. It was perhaps in the low 50's. I left on a bus at 9 bound for Bikaner to the north. I had a good seat but felt tired. We passed fewer plowed fields and even some sand dunes here and there. The trees were low and scrubby. Fence posts were of rock, slabs of a reddish rock maybe 4 to 6 feet high, 8 inches in width and 2 or 3 in breadth. It was odd to see so much stone used as fence posts.
Bikaner is a city of half a million people. I arrived about noon and got a good hotel, had a small, unappetizing lunch and took an autorickshaw to the Lalgarh Palace on the edge of town. It was completed in 1902 for the maharaja and is now partially a luxury hotel and partially still a residence for the royal family. I wandered around the hallways and gardens and then went into the museum across from the entrance. The maharaja who reigned from 1887 to 1943 apparently was quite a figure. He represented India at the Versailles Peace Conference after World War II and can be seen in the famous drawing of the signing of the treaty, standing behind Wilson, Lloyd George and Clemenceau. He, and his predecessors and successors, had great turbans and mustaches. On display was his special spoon, with a ridge down the middle, to enable him to eat soup without soiling his mustache.
From the palace I took another autorickshaw towards the old, walled city and wandered through its narrow but often crowded lanes. The old city is full of 19th century havelis (mansions) with ornately carved facades, windows and balconies. I was told there are about a thousand of them in the old town and that most were built by rich Jain merchants. Now most are boarded up, the families having moved to bigger cities like Bombay and Calcutta to follow commerce when it shifted away from Bikaner as the trade routes across the desert closed. It is such a shame to see all those fantastic buildings slowly crumbling away. Bikaner must have been quite a prosperous town, rich from the caravan trade. As I wandered around I wasn't feeling well. I skipped dinner and returned to my hotel and was sick all night.
I was sick the next morning, too, and spent it in bed except for trips to the bathroom. At about noon I did go out and buy some bottled water and read a newspaper in the lobby. I spent the afternoon reading in bed for the most part and felt okay by night. I had no fever, though I think I may have the night before. About 10:30, just as I was falling asleep, incredibly loud amplified music began. It sounded like it was right next to me, and it was. Just outside the back of the hotel, and outside my window, an all night Hindu ceremony (as I was told the next day) was beginning to bless a new home. The music wasn't bad, though the singing wasn't all that good. But it was incredibly loud and lasted almost all night. I did get some sleep anyway, through sheer exhaustion after being sick, and the music stopped about 5 in the morning.
I slept until 8 or so and when I got up I had a banana and some cookies and then ordered the blandest thing I could find on the hotel's room service menu, a cheese and tomato sandwich on white bread. About 10:30 I took an autorickshaw to the city's 16th century fort, just outside the city walls. Bikaner was founded at the end of the 15th century by Bika, a son of the Maharaja of Jodhpur who struck out north from Jodhpur to found his own kingdom. The fort was built a century later by a successor maharaja who was one of Akbar's generals. The rulers of this areas were Hindus but they allied with the Muslim Mughals and retained their status and a good deal of their independence. Unlike most of Rajasthan's forts, which are located on hills, it is on flat land. It is about 3000 feet in circumference with massive walls. It is really the palaces inside that make it memorable. They are beautifully decorated. It seems like just about every maharaja built his own palace or redecorated a predecessors'. I spent about three hours wandering around, with a good audio tour. I was feeling pretty tired, though.
After the tour, I had lunch in the garden cafe inside the fort. I had a cheese and tomato omelet and I think it may have been the best omelet I've ever had, or so it seemed after being sick. That revived me a bit and I toured a museum inside the fort with some unbelievably elaborate clothes of the maharajas and their wives. (By the way, Bika, Bikaner's founder, was so virtuous that no less than eight of his maharanis committed sati by jumping onto his funeral pyre, or so a book on the maharajas of Bikaner informed me.) I walked half way around the walls of the fort, passing cows and a lot of garbage, to a haveli of a former prime minister just outside the walls. It is now a hotel and I wandered through it and viewed the fort from the roof. In the garden I had an early dinner - a grilled cheese and tomato sandwich (it was kind of a cheese and tomato day). Small birds were flocking to the trees in the garden for the night and the trees were alive with their chirping. I took an autorickshaw back to my hotel before sunset and slept well.
I slept until almost 9 the next morning and spent a leisurely morning at the hotel. About noon I took a bus about 20 miles south to Deshnok, a town I had passed through on the way from Nagaur. There I visited the Karni Mata Temple, made of white marble with silver doors. It is filled with rats. They are supposed to be reincarnations of story tellers or (another version) saints. There are hundreds of them, probably thousands of them. These are not brown and white pet store rats but ugly brown rats. Fortunately, they are not very large, maybe 4 to 5 inches longs, not counting their tails. Just inside the entrance gate into the temple courtyard was a big bowl of milk with maybe twenty rats slurping away. Every so often one of them would get pushed into the milk and scamper out. The rats, as rats do, were crawling all over each other but there was relatively little fighting, probably because they live in a sort of rat paradise, with plenty of food. There were also trays of grain in the courtyard, filled with rats, and pilgrims were bringing sweets to feed the rats. The rats did occasionally run across your feet (no shoes allowed), but you could avoid them for the most part. I tried not to jump too high when they brushed against my feet. Most of the Indian pilgrims there seemed as fascinated with them as I was. One guy, however, was sleeping on a little terrace with rats all around. In the temple itself was another bowl of milk surrounded by rats and in the sanctum sanctorum a tray of sweets covered with rats, with a priest sitting beside it. After an hour or so I had had more than enough of rats and took the bus back back to Bikaner. I went to a colorful Jain temple in the old city and then walked again through the narrow lanes of the old city past derelict havelis and even a camel cart or two before heading back to my hotel.
I spent another leisurely morning at the hotel and left Bikaner on a bus bound for Phalodi at 11. It was quite crowded at times, and very slow moving as was traveled parallel to the Pakistan border and along the edges of the Thar Desert. There wasn't much cultivation. We reached Phalodi, a small town, about 3 and I checked into a hotel across from the bus station. The guy who ran it looked a lot like the character "Animal" from the movie Stalag 17 (I woke him up from a sleep under a ragged blanket), but was very friendly and helpful as I didn't have a lot of tourist information on this town. About 4 I took an autorickshaw to the Jain village of Khichan maybe 3 miles away and spent an hour at two little lakes at the edge of the village. The lakes (and the grain that the Jain villages spread out for them to eat) attract demoiselle cranes wintering from southern Europe, north Africa and Russia and there were thousands of them. Most of these gray cranes, with black and white heads, were on the ground, but as the afternoon wore on, hundreds and hundreds of them flew in and landed at the lakes or flew off into the distance. They were fascinating to watch. I was told they sleep a few kilometers away and return each morning.
Back in Phalodi I walked around the friendly town, including the train station, and had a great dinner at a little restaurant with wooden benches. The guy who owned it came out and talked to me, about whether metal pipes were used in the U.S. and where he could get Hindi translations of American authors. The dinner was fantastic, a paneer (cheese) korma with cashews in it, one of the best meals I've had in India. I can never tell for sure what I'm getting when I order a korma, what kind of sauce it will be. Sometimes they are great and sometimes they are not. This one was fantastic.
I got up at 7:30 the next morning, about sunrise. It was 61 degrees in my room. I had to wake the poor little kid sleeping under a blanket in the office and get him to open the hotel door. It was pretty quiet outside and it took me a half hour to find an autorickshaw to take me to Khichan again. I got there about 8:30 and went to the feeding center. A guy with a house next door invited me onto his roof and showed me books about the cranes and the awards he has received for his care for them. His notebook showed the cranes arrived in September, but less than 100 a day. There are now 8000 a day. They were gathered on the ground outside the village near the feeding center, but over the course of the morning thousands of them flew in, often in huge flocks and often just 30 feet or so over our heads. Sometimes a villager would disturb those on the ground and they would take off and circle in great flocks. They were fantastic to watch. Many emitted a sort of honk and a few seemed to me to make a sort of reconnaissance over the feeding ground. I kept waiting for the feeding, but it never happened. I had been told in Phalodi it might be about 8 or 9. Still, it was great to watch the cranes flying back and forth. For some unaccountable reason this was a far more appealing wildlife experience than my encounter with the wildlife in Deshnok.
I spent almost three hours on that rooftop and then walked to get a closer look at the cranes on the ground before I took an autorickshaw back to Phalodi about 11:30. I checked out of my hotel (the hotel guy said the feeding might have been postponed till noon because of the cold) and had another great meal at that little restaurant before catching a 1 pm bus to Pokaran, which is near where India tests its nuclear bombs. The bus was slow and crowded at times and we got there about 3. On arrival I immediately boarded a very fancy bus, with reclining seats and, above them, sleeping berths. It, too, was filled with people in the aisles and sitting cross-legged on the sleeping berths. However, they gave me a seat near the back and I had a comfortable ride to Jaisalmer across the arid countryside. I saw camels grazing on the leafs of trees here and there and saw a fairly big herd in one spot. On arrival just before 5, I had a good view of Jaisalmer's hilltop fort. I got a good hotel just inside the city walls and walked through the narrow lanes and then through the fort gates up to the heart of the fort. There are about four or five gates that you have to pass through as you make a sharp u-turn up the slope. The fort is about 250 feet higher than the town, on a somewhat triangular shaped hill. It has 99 bastions and a double wall, with a corridor between the two walls about 6-12 feet wide to allow soldiers to pass through, although that corridor is now mostly filled with garbage. I walked around the narrow lanes of the fort until dark. (As I've come quite a bit west from Delhi, it gets dark here about 6:20 this time of year, I think.)
No comments:
Post a Comment