January 23 - 27, 2011: Agra - Mathura - Delhi - Bangkok

I had a leisurely breakfast in the hotel garden in Agra on the morning of the 23rd, and then took a walk through the narrow alleys south of the Taj Mahal.  It was a particularly dirty area and I didn't spend long there, though there was some amusement in that some of the goats wandering around and eating the garbage were wearing old t-shirts or sweaters, no doubt to ward off the winter cold.  It had been warming up, though, considerably warmer than when I first arrived in Agra.

I had lunch and then spent the afternoon again at the Taj Mahal, from about 12:30 to when it  closed about 6:15.  There were huge crowds, much more people than on my visit three days earlier.  I would guess 99% were Indian -- it was a Sunday afternoon.  But I was able to get away from the crowds and sit on benches in the gardens with good views of the Taj.  And the crowds made for some interesting people watching.  A bright orange haired man, with an orange goatee (the orange, I've learned, is caused by henna, a dye from, I think, leaves) was taking photographs.  I've also seen women with their hands and arms decorated with  designs in henna.  At first glance, it looks a little like they have a skin disease.

I took a photo of some barefoot, brightly-saried village women, and one of them came up to me to see the  photo.  Another posed for me, then laughed at the photo.  Some of them were quite dark skinned.  Many Indians are dark skinned and many are quite light skinned, but you only see light skinned Indians on television.  One theory is that light skinned Aryans invaded maybe 3000-3500 years ago into an India populated by darker skinned Dravidian people.  India's great epic, the Mahabharata, apparently contains demeaning references to dark skinned and small nosed people.  And the Hindi word for caste is "varna," which means "color."  The highest castes, the Brahmins (priests) and Kshatriyas (warriors) are supposedly descended from the Aryan invaders.

I walked all over the grounds of the Taj Mahal again, but didn't go into the tomb.  The line to get in went halfway around the building.  I sat on a bench under trees full of parrots in the late afternoon, watching the Taj change colors as the sun descended, and then walked out with the last of the crowd just as the sky got dark.

After breakfast in the hotel arden the next morning, I went to an internet cafe to check in for my flight from Delhi to Bangkok in two days' time, had lunch, again in the hotel garden, and then left on a bus bound for Delhi about 12:30.  We ran into a massive traffic jam and it took us an hour just to get to Akbar's tomb at Sikandra, 6 or so miles from the city center.  Eventually, we got past that and  proceeded on a four lane divided  highway north.  About 2, I got off the bus near the town of Mathura and  took a tempo (a sort of large auto rickshaw, with about 14 passengers) and then a cycle rickshaw into town.  Again, I ran into a massive traffic jam on the cycle rickshaw.  There were hardly any cars involved -- mostly cycle and auto rickshaws, motorcycles, a horse cart or two, lots of pedestrians and even an apparently befuddled cow.  I finally reached my hotel on the riverfront about 3.

Mathura, on the Yamuna River, is one of the holiest cities of India, as it is considered the birthplace of Krishna, one of the avatars (the 7th) of Vishnu.  I walked along the ghats on the riverfront, with boats with brightly colored flags tied up waiting for hire by  pilgrims or tourists like me.  The riverfront was quiet in the afternoon.  I walked through the busy town, with narrow alleys and lots of shops, catering both to pilgrims and to the general  population.  I saw holy men with the vertical Vishnu markings on their foreheads (devotees of the other great Hindu god, Shiva, wear horizontal forehead markings) and it was all quite interesting.  People were friendly and I didn't see any other westerners until I came across a couple walking their bikes on the narrow, crowded street, making their way from Delhi to the southern tip of India, which sounds insane considering the nature of India's traffic.  I passed a 17th century mosque, with a colorful vegetable market below its entrance, and eventually reached the city's main temple, with Krishna's birthplace.

This area is heavily guarded, as it is the focus of another of India's Hindu-Moslem disputes.  There have been Hindu temples at Mathura for 2000 years or more, but after about 1000 the invading Moslems kept destroying them.  The Hindus kept rebuilding them, but the Moghul Emperor Aurangzeb oversaw the last cycle of destruction in the late 1600's and built a huge red sandstone mosque over the ruins of the temple housing Vishnu's birthplace.  There are lots of police around and barbed wire between the mosque and the temple complex.  I underwent a very thorough search before being allowed to enter the temple complex and was not allowed to take in my bag or camera.  The chamber of Vishnu's birth is huddled right next to and beneath the much higher red sandstone walls of Aurangzeb's mosque.  It is a modern building, and in fact looks very modern (probably rebuilt or remodeled recently).  The birth chamber inside is small, at most about 30 feet by 30 feet, and is completely modern.  Some musicians were playing inside and three women  pilgrims were dancing in front of the altar.  There was only a small crowd, though, maybe 20 people.  There were more people in a larger temple nearby, with lots of noise, mainly the clashing of cymbals.

I walked back to the river and my hotel, arriving just before nightfall.  About 7 there was an aarti ceremony at a temple on the river a bit upriver from my hotel, with a priest waving a plate of fire on a platform above the steps down to the river.  It lasted about 15 minutes, with another small crowd, maybe 50 people.  I went back to the hotel and had a good thali dinner, with a particularly good eggplant dish.

I got up about 7 the next morning and went out to the river, with a little mist above it.  A few devotees were on the ghats, praying and leaving flowers and tiny fires, of ghee, I think.  The monkeys (macaques) were out in force, too, hundreds of them.  They were coming down from the few trees on the riverbank, where I suppose they had spent the night, onto the ghats to eat the flowers left there by pilgrims and any other food they could find, and there was lots of garbage, as usual, to pick through.  Both monkeys and cows were on the river searching for food.  Near the temple some people were bathing in the river, and there were strangely dressed priests and saddhus around.  The sun rose over the river downstream.  It was all quite interesting, and I hung around until about 8:30 before returning to the hotel for a good breakfast of alu parantha (a potato filled pancake-like bread) and curd.  After breakfast I walked through the colorful town again to Aurungzeb's mosque, but the police wouldn't let me in.  A good number of water buffalo were gathered just beneath the mosque entrance, with hundreds of water buffalo dung patties drying in the sun nearby.

I took a tempo north to the town of Vrindavan, about 6 miles from Mathura.  This town, too, is full of temples as it was where Krishna spent his childhood.  None of them are very ancient, as the temples here, too, were destroyed by the Moslems.  I did go into the oldest temple, dating from the 16th century.  Not much was happening there, though it was filled with monkeys, but at another nearby temple there was an interesting ceremony of parading  bare-chested priests, some with horns, some with cymbals and some with fly wisks.  Hindu ceremonies seem to be more concerned with making noise rather than making music.  The ceremony stopped abruptly and the priests took their horns, cymbals and fly wisks to a store room.  I wandered around the town, through narrow alleys and passing other temples and quite a few saddhus.  A big group of them was gathered in one courtyard.

I had to get to Delhi that day for my flight to Bangkok the next morning, so about 1 I headed back to Mathura and my hotel.  Otherwise, I would have spent more time in Vrindavan and Mathura.  When I got back to Mathura I went first to the city's museum containing beautiful sculpture of the so-called Mathura School, from the first to six centuries A.D., of red sandstone of Buddhist and Hindu figures.  These are from the Buddhist and Hindu temples destroyed by the Moslems.  From the museum I took a cycle rickshaw to my hotel and got stuck in another traffic jam in the same spot as the day before.  Back at the hotel I had a quick late lunch, one final Indian thali, and then took a cycle rickshaw to the bus station and left for Delhi about 3:45.  We made good time for the first two hours, but then got stuck in another massive traffic jam, for about an hour, around the city of Faridabad.  There was more heavy traffic in Delhi and I finally got off the bus about 8.  It is less than 90 miles from Mathura to Delhi, but it took me 4 1/4  hours to get there.  I took an auto rickshaw to the hotel where I had stayed in November.  After dinner, checking on my flight on the internet, and a final bucket bath in a cold room, I got to bed about 11:30.

I woke up about 3:15 the next morning after at most 2 1/2 hours of sleep, as it has been noisy until after midnight.  I got up at 4 and left in a taxi for the airport at 4:30.  Delhi has a beautiful new airport.  My flight to Calcutta left about 6:30 and arrived about 8.  The sun rose during the flight, but it was too hazy below to see anything.  Calcutta's airport is considerably less attractive than Delhi's, and I left about 11:15 for Bangkok, arriving about 3 Bangkok time (1:30 in India).  I had a good view of the Irrawaddy Delta in Burma on the way.  I was happy to see the temperature in Bangkok reported on the screen on the back of the seat in front of me was 32 C. -- 90 degrees F.

I got a bus from the airport and checked into a hotel in the Banglamphu area about 5 and walked around a bit before sunset.  There were masses of tourists, much more than when I was here last July.  I revelled in the warm air, and rejoiced that no one was honking, despite the heavy traffic on some of the streets.  There was no pushing or shoving or spitting.  A motorcyclist came towards me on pedestrian-filled Khao San Road and actually stopped to let me pass rather than honk at me and keep on coming directly at me.  The streets weren't covered with litter, or with cow and human excrement.  There was no smell of urine on the walls.  It all seemed so clean and orderly and quiet -- and in Bangkok no less.  On Khao San  Road the hawkers and touts would leave you alone after a simple no or a negative shake of the head.  Quite a change from India, and a very welcome one.  I had a good dinner, went to bed about 10, and slept for 10 hours.

I got up a little after 8 the next morning (today) and haven't done much today but relax.  I had dinner with Phil Carlile, with whom I traveled for over a month in India.  He has just arrived from Burma and is on his way to Laos.  My return to Saipan isn't until February 14, so I plan to go to Cambodia in the interim and hope to see some of the Khmer temples in the northwest, those more remote than Angkor Wat.  If I have time, I will go to the coast, but I doubt there will be time for that.  Last January and February I spent seven weeks in Laos and Cambodia.  I spent more than five of those weeks in Laos, which left me with only 10 days in Cambodia, so I'm planning on visiting some of the places I missed last February.

January 12 - 22, 2011: Bundi to Agra via Ranthambore National Park and Bharatpur

I had thought about leaving Bundi on the 12th, but decided to stay another day in that pleasant city.  I walked through the alleys of the old town before breakfast and noticed men on bikes and motorcycles delivering milk from the metal basins attached to their bikes or motorcycles.  They poured out milk from the basins into the containters brought to them by their customers.  I also saw a guy scooping out handfuls (with his hands) of thick cream from a metal container of perhaps five gallons and depositing the cream into a vat over a fire.  He told me he was making ghee, clarified butter, and that it would take about three hours.  I came back after about an hour and it was still boiling.  After breakfast on the hotel roof, I spent the day wandering around the city.  I passed two guys in a little workshop making bracelets over a little fire, and that was interesting to watch.  Indian women often wear maybe ten or more bracelets on each arm.  I passed metal bashers, vegetable sellers, firewood sellers (and women bringing them firewood), plus much more.  Lots of kites were on sale, in preparation for a state-wide kite-flying day coming up in two days.  People were friendly and I enjoyed strolling around.  In the late afternoon I discovered a guy who sold the best lassi I've ever had.  A lassi is a yoghurt drink you find all over India and this guy made his with saffron, giving it a yellowish tinge, plus raisins, pistachios and other nuts.  I had dinner again on the hotel roof next to the fire, though it was a much warmer night than the previous ones.

The next morning, after a stroll around the alleys of the old town and breakfast on the roof, I finally did leave Bundi on a bus about 10:30 to Kota, less than an hour away.  The auto rickshaw driver who took me from the Kota bus station to the Kota train station made a stop on the way to buy a couple of bundles of green vegetation from some women.  He flung the bundles to a small herd of cattle in a muddy (and more than just mud, no doubt) spot just beyond the women.  The cattle were already munching on the green vegetation, apparently given to them  by previous customers.  I waited about an  hour at the train station, and then left about 1 on a train heading northeast to Sawai Madhopur, arriving about 3.  We passed green wheat and yellow mustard fields through mostly flat countryside, though there were some hills about halfway there.  In Sawai Madhopur I got a hotel room on the road to Ranthambhore National Park and had a poor late lunch on the hotel roof.  I strolled around a bit, but there was nothing to see, and had dinner with some other tourists at a roadside restaurant, also not very good.  It was cold there at night.

I spent most of the next morning on the roof of the hotel, having breakfast and lunch and sitting in the sun.  A little after noon I did walk to the park office to see how they sold tickets.  I had asked my hotel guy to get mine for the park and he charged me a large commission.  The fees are calculated rather weirdly.  My entry the first day cost 889 rupees, about $20, plus the hotel guy took a commission of 511 rupees, about $11-12.  The park is the best place in Rajasthan to see tigers.  There are 35 in the 600 square kilometer park.  The park provides three hour tours in the morning and afternoon, and because of the cold I decided to take an afternoon tour.  About 2:30 the "gypsy," a type of open jeep with two rows of three seats picked me up at my hotel and we headed into the park.  There are five different routes in the park and we did route 1, a wooded and hilly area, although fairly dry.  We saw some magnificent banyan trees.  We saw no tigers, but we did see pug marks (that is, tiger paw marks) in the dust of the road.  We did see lots of cheetal and sambar deer, plus langur monkeys, wild peacocks and other birds.  The driver drove too fast and stopped not long enough when we did spot wildlife, but I enjoyed the trip.  Near the end of the afternoon he apparently spotted pug marks of two tigers and drove all over trying, unsuccessfully, to find them.  I got back to my hotel about 5:30, after about two and a half hours in the park.

After breakfast on the hotel roof the next morning, I walked to the train station to buy my ticket for the next day to Bharatpur.  I always enjoy train stations and spent some time looking around the British-era station.  I noticed a cattle guard at one of the entrances, and later noticed a cow on the tracks at one end of the station.  I left from the hotel on another safari at 2:30, this time in a "canter," a larger vehicle, with 17 seats.  They aren't as nimble as the gypsies, but we had a better route, route 3, said to be the best.  On the way into the park, a leopard was spotted on a ridge to the left of the entry road.  All the vehicles stopped, a veritable traffic jam, and, unbelievably (except that this is India), one of the gypsies in the back started honking its horn to try to get through.  Some people in our canter thought they spotted the leopard, but I didn't.  Moving on, we passed Ranthambhore Fort, towering far above us on a rocky hill, and spent the afternoon driving around a lake to the east of the fort.  This was a beautiful area.  Again, we saw no tiger, but we did see lots of deer, some wild boar, and lots of birds, including some very tame ones with long tails who perched on the canter.  We passed the former hunting lodge of the Maharaja of Jaipur (Ranthambhore was his private preserve) on the lake and our guide told us the last tiger hunt was in 1962.  We had a good look at a big male sambar deer munching grass in the lake.  It became quite cold near the end of the safart, considerably colder than the day before.

I got up at 6 the next morning and at 6:30 took an auto rickshaw in the cold and darkness to the train station.  The sky brightened as I waited at the station and my train left at 7:20.  The sun rose as we headed northeast out of town, passing the Ranthambhore Hills.  I had an interesting guy to talk to on the way as we passed more wheat and mustard fields on the flat terrain (once we got past the hills).  After two and a half hours, I got off at Bharatpur and took an auto rickshaw to a very nice little hotel on the outskirts of town run by a very friendly woman and her daughter.  I had breakfast in the sun on the hotel's back lawn and finally warmed up.  It was sunny, but a little windy, making it colder than most afternoons.  In the afternoon, I took a cycle rickshaw into town and walked around the old town inside the old, huge fort, with massive gates and a wide moat around it. There are still people living inside the fort, plus three old palaces of the Maharaja of Bharatpur.  One of them is a museum and I spent some time there.  Another, larger palace is all locked up.  There were no other western tourist exploring the fort, and few Indian ones.  I walked around inside the fort, and then outside, and finally took a cycle rickshaw back to the hotel.  That night I had dinner at the hotel with four other tourists, a friendly bunch, staying there.

After breakfast the next morning, I took a cycle rickshaw about 9 into the nearby Keoladeo Ghana National Park, a wetlands area famous for its birdlife, with something like 350 species in the winters when the marshes are wet.  I had a young Sikh guy named Biru Singh, and he was very good at spotting birds.  I spent four hours with him, making our way slowly up the paved road through the park, with lots of stops.  Besides birds, we saw quite a lot of other wildlife, including lots of large nilgai antelope, about the size of small horses.  The males are black/gray and the females brown.  We also saw cheetal and sambar deer, jackels, wild boar, and large turtles.  There is also a tiger in the park, but didn't see him or her.  The birds included three owls sleeping in a tree, hundreds of painted storks nesting in trees with their chicks, Indian rollers with spectacular blue wings visible when they took flight, two kinds of colorful kingfishers, cranes, spoonbills, ducks, geese, cormorants, and sarus cranes, said to be the world's tallest flying bird, at 1.6 meters, a little over 5 feet.  They are somewhat rare and I saw three pair of them (or maybe the same pair three times).  About 1 I had Biru Singh deposit me at the park restaurant for lunch, and afterward spent the rest of the afternoon on a bike, which was very enjoyable.  I found a wall with a record of the famous bird shoots here hosted by the Maharaja of Bharatpur, starting with Lord Curzon, the Viceroy, in 1902, continuing up to 1964.  There were other viceroys and maharajas, plus other royalty including the Prince of Wales in 1921 and even an American Senatorial delegation in the late '40's.  In the late afternoon the painted storks in particular were quite active, with their large chicks, almost as large as their parents, squawking for food and the parents flying in with it.  I bicycled back to the entrance and left just at sunset, at about 5:45.  The afternoon had been nice, but now it was cold.  From the entrance, I made the short walk back to my hotel.

After breakfast the next morning I took a bus north to Deeg about 10, arriving less than an hour and a half later after passing more wheat and mustard fields.  Deeg is a dusty town with the former summer palace of the Maharaja of Bharatpur.  There are tanks on either side of the palace, with women washing and men and women bathing on the steps.  I spent several hours looking around and visiting the palace buildings.  One was furnished and it was interesting to see the early 20th century furniture, which one of the caretakers told me was 200 years old.  There was an elephant foot with decanters inside and a stuffed tiger in the main room.  Another room had two tiger cubs in glass cases.  The enormous bathrooms with old fashioned bathtubs and sinks were interesting.  I also went into the part of the palace used by the local government, with men in the courtyard pecking away at old typewriters next to bundles of legal papers.  A nearly naked beggar with a tattered blanket slept in the dirt.  An enormous fort stood to the east of the palace, but I couldn't find a way in.  I took the bus back about 3 and spoke with an 83 year old man from Bombay also staying at the hotel with his daughter and granddaughter at dinner.  He originally came from Andhra Pradesh, in the south, but moved to Bombay 60 years ago to work on atomic energy research.

The next morning I took a bus about 10 to Fatehpur Sikri, only about 13 miles to the east.  This is the place where Akbar, the third and greatest of the Moghul emperors, built his capital.  However, it was only the capital from 1571 to 1585.  Apparently, water was a problem, and the buildings were abandoned after Akbar's death in 1605.  The British restored them a century ago and it is a very interesting site.  I remember being very impressed with it when I first saw it in 1979.  There is an enormous mosque, with an enormous gate.  Inside is the tomb of Salim Chisti, a Sufi saint who prophesied that Akbar would have three sons (seems a fairly safe prophecy for a man with multiple wives and hundreds of concubines, but apparently Akbar's sons had all died.)  When Akbar did have a son, he decided to build his capital on the rocky ridge where the saint lived.  The tomb is of marble, and a marble screen inside is full of strings put there by women hoping for sons.  After the mosque, I went through the palace buildings with a French guy I had met at the bus stop in Bharatpur, and I enjoyed that.  It is quite clear there has been a lot of restoration.  There are good views from the palace ridge out over the fields of mustard.  The French guy left for Agra, only 20 miles away, and I wandered slowly again through the palace buildings of red sandstone.

Afterward, I took a path between the mosque and the palace down the ridge past the Elephant Gate, with two ruined stone elephants on it, down to a huge caravansarai where boys were playing cricket in the dusty courtyard while goats grazed alongside.  I walked along the roof of the caravansarai and then to a tower below it studded with replicas of elephant tusks.  Quite odd, and the experts don't seem to know why it was decorated so.  From there I walked to the village of Sikri a little over a mile away, passing through mustard fields along very friendly and I regretted deciding not to spend a night in Fatehpur Sikri to be able to spend more time walking around.  I returned up the ridge and went around and into the mosque again, very nice in the late afternoon sun, before making my way down through the bazaars of Fatehpur (Fatehpur is on one side of the ridge and Sikri is on the other) to the bus stop.  I spent a half hour or so at the bus stop waiting for the Bharatpur bus and talking to a guy before giving up and walking to the highway where I could catch a bus for the short ride back to Bharatpur.  I got there shortly after 6.

I took the bus to Agra the next morning, leaving Bharatpur about 10 and getting to Agra less than an hour and a half later.  I took a cycle rickshaw from the bus station and got a great hotel right next to the east gate of the Taj Mahal for only about $11 a night.  The hotel has a restaurant in a garden and I had lunch there before heading into the Taj Mahal about 1:30.  The Taj has a high wall all around the large garden in which it sits, so you don't really get a good look at it until you enter the huge southern gate, and then it almost takes your breath away.  It is a spectacularly beautiful building, on a platform above the Yamuna River with only sky for a background.  I spent the afternoon there, leaving with the last tourists when it closed about 6.  And there were lots of tourists, thousands of them, and about 90% of them Indian, and as many non-Indian Asian tourists, it seemed, as western ones.  I walked around the gardens and then up to the Taj and the red sandstone mosque to the west, with a matching building to the east.  The chamber inside the Taj is relatively small, with the cenotaph of Mumtaz Mahal in the center, with that of her husband, the fifth Moghul emperor Shah Jahan, to the side.  They are actually buried in a crypt below.  It was crowded, and noisy, inside, quite a change from 1979, as I remember.  I looked down at the river, occupying less than third of the river bed, I'd say.  It became chilly late in the afternoon, but it was interesting to see the Taj change color as the sun set and the light faded.  There are lots of police outside the gates, and in fact all around the complex, and they do a very thorough search of you upon entry, quite unlike the cursory checks you usually get here in India.  It costs 750 rupees, about $17, to get in, two and a half times the highest entry fee I've paid elsewhere in India.  It was quite cold that night, and I slept in my clothes (as I have for the past several weeks) under four blankets.

It was 55 degrees in my room when I got up the next morning at 8.  I had a long breakfast in the sun in the hotel garden and afterward walked through the green, tree-filled, but somewhat dusty park between the Taj Mahal and the Agra Fort upriver to the north, less than two miles away.  I got to this massive red sandstone fort about 11:30 and spent almost five hours inside wandering around.  It is double-walled, with the inside wall over 70 feet high and the outer wall maybe a third of that.  Akbar built it and his successors improved it.  The entry curves through several gates.  You can visit only about a third of the area inside; the rest is used by the military.  One large red sandstone palace was built by Akbar; the marble buildings were built by Shah Jahan and are quite beautiful.  Shah Jahan was deposed by his son Aurangzeb in 1658 and spent the last eight years of his life as a prisoner in the fort, able to see the Taj Mahal only from afar.  The view of the Taj was fairly hazy, though it got better later in the afternoon.  Agra has become an industrial city of almost a million and a half people.  They are trying to cut pollution.  Auto rickshaws are required to run on natural gas and most cars aren't allowed near the Taj.  I left the fort and walked back to my hotel, arriving before dark.

The next morning (today) before breakfast I walked down to the river next to the Taj to see it from below in the early morning sun.  Police were stationed nearby.  After breakfast in the hotel garden, I hired an auto rickshaw to take me to Sikandra, about six miles from the town center, to see Akbar's Mausoleum.  It is large and imposing, and apparently was in ruins until restored by the British a century ago.  His tomb is in an austere crypt in the large building at the center of the gardens, where deer are grazing on the grass.  A high wall surrounds the site.  I spent an  hour and a half there and then we went back to Agra to a tomb called the Chini-ka-Rauza on the Yamuna River, built for the prime minister of Shah Jahan.  It was in pretty bad condition, but with the remnants of beautiful tiles.  Below it. on the riverside, was a herd of perhaps 30-40 water buffalo, and drying in the sun were thousands of what I suppose were water buffalo dung patties, to be used as fuel.  Women were using their hands to fashion the patties, and there was quite a smell wafting up.  From there we headed up the river a bit to another tomb, this one of the prime minister of Jahangir (and, not coincidentally, I imagine, the father of this wife).  Jahangir's wife, Nur Jahan, was the power behind the throne and built this tomb for her father and mother.  It is a beautiful building of white marble inlaid with precious stones, surrounded by gardens.  It is called by some the "Baby Taj," and was built in the 1620's.  The Taj was constructed from 1631 to 1648.  From there we proceeded further upriver to a spot just opposite the Taj in order to see it from that angle.  Police were camped nearby.  Next I had the auto rickshaw cross the river and drop me off near the Jama Masjid, the city's principal mosque, now in great disrepair.  I walked from there to the Delhi Gate of the Fort, formerly the main gate but now used only for the military, and then to the Agra Fort Railway Station, built by the British.  I walked along the reddening fort walls in the late afternoon sun and then through the park back to the Taj Mahal and my hotel.

January 5 -11, 2011: Udaipur to Bundi via Dungarpur and Chittorgarh

About 10 am on the 5th I took a bus south from Udaipur to Dungarpur, about 60 miles away.  I had thought about spending the night there, but since it was only a two and a half hour trip there I decided to make it a day trip.  We traveled through the Aravalli Hills on a four lane divided highway for most of the way, and then a narrow country road for the last 10-15 miles.  On the way were several advirtisements for something called Fat-Go, which I had seen advirtised elsewhere in India.  (By the way, I weighed myself while in Udaipur and weighed 73 kilos, about 161 pounds, with my clothes on.  Traveling in India is a great way to lose weight.  You don't need the Fat-Go.)

Upon arrival I took an auto rickshaw to the old palace, the Juna Mahal, accessed through a rickety old gate.  It seemed deserted as I climbed the hill from the gate through weeds and past crumbling interior gates.  The palace looked a bit like an old haunted mansion, though made of stone.  I poked around and finally found an old guy in a dhoti who told me I needed to get a ticket to go inside, and that I had to get a ticket from the "palace hotel" in town.  So I walked down the hill and through the rickety gate, and then through the narrow lanes of the old town until I found an auto rickshaw to take me to the Udai Bilas Palace, built by the Maharaja of Dungarpur in the 19th century (and then extended in the 20th) on a lake across from the town.  It is now a hotel with a nice location on the lake.  I bought my ticket and then looked around the hotel.  There are old photos and a stuffed tiger or two, plus some other stuffed animal heads on the walls.  I decided to have lunch there on a lawn next to the swimming pool at the lake's edge, with a temple and ducks on the lake and the noise of the city far away.  I had a relatively expensive (but only $5-6) and not very good lunch, but with great views over the lake.

I made my way back to the Juna Mahal by foot and then auto rickshaw and spent an hour or so going through it.  It is nine stories high, but not very wide or broad.  There are lots of interesting little rooms, with some great paintings, especially in the rooms for the maharaja and his two principal wives.  In the maharaja's suite is a cupboard where behind closed coupboard doors are several (maybe 20-25) illustrations from the Kama Sutra, quite explicit.  From the roof tops there are also good views of the city below and the hills surrounding the city.  The guide told me the Juna Mahal was inhabited until the 1950's by the maharaja's family.

Afterward I walked a bit again through the old city, full of little open-side shops with people sitting on the floor within, and then took an autorickshaw to the bus station.  About halfway to Udaipur, just as it was getting dark about 6, we reached a toll plaza blocked by trucks.  Our bus crossed into the lanes going the other direction and parked parallel to the trucks coming the other direction and our bus driver and conductor disappeared.  Eventually, my seatmate explained to me that a toll booth guy had beat up a bus driver and the truck and bus drivers had blocked the toll booth lanes in retaliation.  I asked him why the truck drivers were involved and he said all drivers are united.  The toll booth workers had fled.  I asked him how long he thought we would be stuck there and he said an hour, until the police came from Udaipur.  And indeed about an hour later the trucks revved up and started to leave and we eventually made our way through the toll booths and back to Udaipur, arriving about 8.  My seatmate told me a police inspector had arrived from Udaipur and promised to investigate the situation.

The next morning I did leave Udaipur for good, taking a 10 am bus to Chittorgarh, a two and a half hour trip to the east through mostly flat countryside.  Upon arrival I got a crummy hotel, ate a sandwich I had brought from Udaipur, and then took an auto rickshaw up to the massive fort that dominates the town, rising 500 feet above it on a hill that runs for maybe three miles north to south, but is narrow so that the fort is roughly cigar shaped.  The area inside the fort is mostly just scrub now, but was where all the people of the city once lived.  This is where Udai, the founder of Udaipur, fled from after its capture by Akbar, though it was later returned to his successors by Akbar's son Jehangir.  Apparently, there was a massive jauhar (mass suicide) at the time, with women and children jumping into fire while the men charged the enemy.  There were a couple of previous jauhars, too.  Inside are the ruins of palaces and temples, and a couple of interesting, well-carved towers, one called a "victory tower" near the western wall and the other a Jain tower near the eastern wall.  I climbed the first up to the 8th of the 9 stories of the victory tower, with great views over the fort.  Nearby are a Shiva temple, a tank (reservoir) and the ruins of a palace. There is a gate on the eastern side with great views over the plains to the east, where wheat and mustard seed are growing.  The Jain temple next to the Jain tower had two posters of naked, pot-bellied, middle aged men sitting in the lotus position and one poster of a similar man walking without clothes and carrying a little basket.  (One group of Jains believes in absolutely no possessions, mot even clothes, I have read.).  I traveled from spot to spot inside the fort with the auto rickshaw, driven by a friendly old guy.  Goats were being herded up through the eastern gate and he told me about 5,000 people still live in villages inside the walls.  After about three hours, we came back down through the many gates on the western side of the fort to the modern city of Chittorgarh.  It was very cold that night in the crummy little hotel, plus I had a terrible meal in the hotel restaurant, and very noisy neighbors until well after midnight.  So not a great night.

The next morning, after a breakfast of cookies and bananas, I happily left Chittorgarh for Bundi.  I went by bus and it took five hours, though mostly on a new four lane divided highway, but there were lots of excursions to small towns off the highway.  It was actually fairly interesting, passing fields of wheat and mustard seed.  I saw lots of interesting and colorful turbans on the way.  It seems young men don't wear them and I wonder if they will die out in a generation or two.  The terrain was mostly flat until it got a little hillier near Bundi.  I got a nice hotel (brand new, and seemingly very clean, though we did have to chase a rat out of it the first day) in Bundi, a town of less than 100,000 nestled between hills and ate a late lunch on its roof in the sun with great views of the massive palace on the side of a hill above the town.  I also saw a newspaper with a story about the cold wave hitting the area, with a low of 2.6 degrees centigrade (about 37.5 F.) in Jaipur, less than 100 miles north.  (The next day it got down to 1.6 C., so about 35.7 F.  I also read that the high about the same time in Delhi was about 41 F.  The guy at the hotel in Bundi says it is much colder than usual this winter.  Rajasthan is known for extremely high temperatures in the summer, regularly over 110 and sometimes over 120, but I will remember it for the cold.)  In the late afternoon and early evening I took a walk around the very nice, but dirty, town.  I walked to a tank, a rectangular reservoir, on the edge of town, with great views up to the palace, lit up by lights, and the fort on the top of the hill above the palace.  It was very cold that night in Bundi, and in my hotel room.  It was 61 degrees in my room when I went to bed and 59 when I got up the next morning.

The next morning I had a good breakfast on the hotel roof and about 10 made my way up to the palace.  I quite enjoyed it, spending about five hours wandering around.  There are great views up to the fort and down to the town, plus some great miniature paintings on the walls.  There are two parts to the palace, the old part built about 1600, I think, and the newer Chitrasala built at the end of the 18th century, with excellent wall paintings. I came back to my hotel to take a bucket bath about 3, though it took 45 minutes for the water to heat up, and then the power went off and so I bathed in the dark.  Clean again, after a couple of days without daring to bathe in the cold, I had a late lunch in the sun next to the rectangular tank on the edge of town.  It's full of dirty water, as always seems to be the case.  I enjoyed sitting in the sun and then walking around the town.  That night I had dinner on my hotel roof next to a quite warm little fire.  I stayed up there until about 10 talking to another tourist and the hotel guys before retiring to my cold room.

After breakfast the next morning, I climbed up to the fort on the top of the hill beyond the palace and above the city.  It's about a 500 foot climb past crumbling walls and gates and scrub vegetation.  I enjoyed  wandering around and seeing the deserted buildings, tanks and towers.  There are fantastic views in all directions.  It is another of Rajasthan's massive forts and I spent five hours wandering around.  At one point I was sitting and talking to two other tourists next to a very deep tank with a little water way down covered with green slime when a troop of maybe 20 monkeys (macaques) made their way down the steps of the tank and drank from the water, after first brushing away the slime.  Back in town, I walked around a bit, particularly through the narrow alleys of the old town, full of blue houses and friendly people, and not too many motorcycles.  Bundi is quite a nice town.  I ate again on the hotel roof, with very good Indian food while sitting next to the fire.

I had breakfast the next morning on the highest part of the hotel roof, with the most sun, while the cook guarded me from the aggressive macaques with a bamboo stick.  There are also langurs on the rooftops, but they are much less troublesome.  There were quite a few of macaques huddled together against the cold on a nearby roof when I first got up on the roof.  After breakfast I spent several hours wandering around town.  The people were great and there were some wonderful turbans to be seen.  I walked past a city gate and a colorful vegetable market, and investigated several step wells, wells from a couple of centuries ago or longer which were the water sources of the time.  One was quite beautifully decorated, though now dirty with pigeion detritus, feathers and poop.  It was 150 feet deep.  (Somebody told me you now have to go down 300 or 400 feet to get water.)  There are said to be 50 or so of these step wells (so-called because steps lead down to the water) in Bundi and I've seen five or six of them. I also watched white-clothed guys with multi-covered turbans on motorcycles with big brass basins of several gallons attached to them by chains as they collected and dispensed milk from the basins.

At one of the step wells I got to talking to a guy who was an auctioneer at the nearby grain wholesale market. A French tourist and I went with him to his little office where he showed us various kinds of seeds, about twenty varieties including little black mustard seeds.  He was quite interesting, telling us how grain was sold and prices for various grains.  He was an enthusiastic, friendly guy, though with a screen saver on his mobile phone of Hitler.  He hold us he admired Hitler as a great man, even though, he said, he went bad after he got power, and that he watches everything he can on Hitler.  He is also a coin collector, and had a 1924 1/12 anna coin.  At that time there were 16 annas in a rupee, so it was worth 1/192 of a rupee.  After talking to him, we walked over to the grain market, with acres of piles of grains, mostly unhusked rice, called paddy.  The piles had been sold, or were being sold by auctioneers, and the rice was being put into burlap sacks and weighed before being put onto trucks or, in one case, camel carts.  We were told much is exported.  People there were very friendly, wanting their photos taken.  The same was true all over town, for the most part.  One somewhat fierce looking, impressively mustachioed guy with a very colorful turban saw me taking his picture earlier in the day and came over towards me.  Rather than slice me to bits with his scimitar he politely and rather shyly asked to see the photo and then posed for another.

From the grain market I walked back to my hotel, stopping on the way to have some masala tea.  I watched the guy prepare it, boiling the minced tea leaves in a water and milk mixture and crushing black pepper, cloves and ginger with a smooth rock and boiling them (well, not the rock) in the tea.  Later I walked through the narrow lanes and blue buildings of the old city to the northern or Delhi gate of the old city.  I passed some incredibly dirty step wells, one of which now appears to be a public toilet.  The other ones I had seen had been cleaned, at least to some extent.  Lots of cows and cow excrement in the narrow lanes, too, of course, as usual.  India is a dirty place.  From the Delhi Gate I walked a short distance to a blue lake with a small palace called the Sukh Mahal on its southern end.  Rudyard Kipling stayed there for a night, apparently, and on of my guidebooks says he wrote part of Kim there. (The sign in front of the main palace in Bundi quotes Kipling's description of the palace, in which he says something about it looking like the work of goblins rather than of men, but the sign mistakenly substitutes the word "cobbling" for "goblins.")  I took another late afternoon bucket bath and had another enjoyable dinner on the hotel roof next to the fire.  The hotel guys are quite interesting and the other guests are, too.

The next morning (today), I had breakfast on the hotel roof and then took a bus to Kota about 11.  Kota is a much bigger city about 20 miles to the southeast and it took less than an hour to get there.  Once there, I took an autorickshaw to the very large city palace of the Maharajas of Kota only to discover it was closed because of a government holiday.  The palace was pretty much the reason I had come to Kota, so I made my way back to Bundi about 2 pm and have spent the afternoon wandering around a bit and in an internet cafe.  The guys at the hotel were playing wiffle cricket in the very narrow (maybe five feet wide) alley in front of the hotel, though wacking away at the plastic wiffle ball with a wooden cricket bat.  A plastic chair served as the wickets.  Early that morning, when I was walking around before breakfast, I came across a bunch of guys hosing each other off in the early morning chill.  The water was warm, from a natural source in the ground, I was told.  Most of them were getting all wet while fully clothed, though a few were stripping down to their underwear.  I guess that is the only chance for a hot bath for some.  It has warmed up a bit in Bundi since my arrival, but it is still quite cold at night and in the morning.

December 28, 2010 - January 4, 2011: Jodhpur to Udaipur via Mount Abu

I woke up on the morning of December 28 in Jodhpur to the sounds of rain and thunder. (The night before,  just as I returned to my hotel from the internet cafe, there was a five minute rainstorm, followed by about a twenty minute electrical blackout as the city's electrical system reacted to the unexpected rain.)  I had breakfast on the roof under cloudy skies and it rained again just as I was getting ready to leave from the hotel about 10.  I have a weather chart for selected Indian cities and it shows the average rainfall in Jodhpur in December to be one millimeter (about 1/25 of an inch), so I suppose the average has now gone up considerably.  The rain made for a cold auto rickshaw ride to the bus station.  I left on a 10:45 bus full of sniffling, sneezing people.

I had a choice of a window seat near the back or an aisle seat near the front, and chose the latter, and consequently was  jostled by passengers in the aisle during the long, 7 1/2 hour trip.  We traveled first through agricultural fields south of Jodhpur, with some rain, and then increasingly dry terrain further south.  Finally, we reached a hilly area, the Aravalli Hills.  We arrived in Abu Road, the  rail head for Mount Abu, about 5:15 and from there it was an hour climb over only about 15 miles to Mount Abu, at around 4000 feet elevation.  The trees and bushes on the  hillsides got denser as we climbed and we arrived just as it was getting dark.  I found a  hotel and looked around. 

Mount Abu is full of hotels (including the Sheratone and the Hilltone) and  restaurants and seems totally given over to tourism.  It was full of Indian tourists, with very few westerners.  The Indian tourists are primarily from Gujarat, just to the south, and I was told they come to Mount Abu for Christmas and New Year because Gujarat is a dry state and they can get  liquor in Mount Abu.  There were a large number of "English Wine and Beer Shops" (the Indian term for liquor stores; I'm suspect in no other the country the words "English" and "Wine" appear together so frequently).  I walked around a bit after dinner and visited the "World Renewal Spiritual Museum," with a sign over the entrance proclaiming "Gateway to Paradise."  It contained dioramas and paintings with hard to understand English labels.  They seemed anxious to close up for the evening.

It was cloudy the next morning, but not too cold despite the altitude (I had been told in Jodhpur that in Mount Abu the temperature dropped below freezing at night).  I walked around the lake and up to a rock in the shape of a toad, with good views of the lake.  There wasn't much to see, but the people were friendly, in a  holiday mood.  One guy insisted taking lots of photos of me with Toad Rock or the lake in the background.  About two in the afternoon I took a shared jeep about three miles to the north to the Jain temples at Dilwara.  They are beautifully carved, but there were hordes of noisy Indian tourists being herded through.  Not a very peaceful temple experience.  I walked  back into town under cloudy skies.

The sky was clear and sunny the next morning.  Hotel prices were set to double and triple for New Year, but I was ready to leave and did so on the  9:15 bus to Udaipur.  We went first to Abu Road, with lots of langur monkeys on the roadside on the way down.  We didn't leave Abu Road until 11 and reached Udaipur about 3 after a trip partly on a new  four lane divided highway through the scenic Aravalli Hills.  I think we reached an altitude of 3000 feet or so on the way.  Udaipur, with 400,000 people, is at an altitude of around 1800 feet, or so says my altimeter.  I found a hotel and looked around.  There were lots of foreign tourists.  Udaipur was founded by a guy named (you guessed it) Udai, the local maharaja, in  1559 after he had fled Akbar's forces which  had captured his stronghold of Chittorgarh to the east.  Udaipur is on a lake, enlarged by Udai and  his  successors.  Palaces front the lake, and there are two palaces on islands in the lake.  It is all very scenic.

I woke up the next morning (New Year's Eve) with a very bad sinus infection, the result of too much dust and cold, I suspect.  I started  taking antibiotics and didn't feel like doing much.  I did walk around a bit and visited a museum in an old haveli with more than 130 rooms, it is claimed.  I visited considerably fewer.  It had a very interesting turban collection, with turbans and  photos or drawings of people wearing them.  People wore different turbans depending on their office in the government, their caste and their profession.  Besides turbans for maharajas and the like, there were turbans on display for tailors and carpenters, and even ground nut sellers and oil seed vendors.  Later I spent some time at the Lal Ghat, the steps on the lake where women were washing clothes and both men and women were bathing in the dirty water.  About 4 pm I crossed a little pedestrian bridge, partially blocked with lounging cows, and walked to the southern end of a little peninsula into the lake.  I stayed there until sunset, a little before 6, and watched the palace buildings change color in the setting sun.  Not feeling all that well, I went to bed before midnight, but I did hear loud music till midnight and lots of firecrackers at midnight.

I slept late the next morning, ate a leisurely breakfast on the roof of my hotel in the sun, and about noon walked to the old palace on the lake and spent the afternoon there.  It is an interesting place, though not as beautifully decorated as some of the other palaces I have visited in Rajasthan.  I had a good audio tour, but there were hordes of Indian tourists, making getting around difficult until they thinned out a bit in the later afternoon.  One of the signs in the palace museum was unintentionally humorous, describing how at coronations a big basin was filled with rupees and then "squandered" on the poor.  The audio tape told of a beautiful daughter of the maharaja who ruled from 1778 to 1828 who was mistakenly promised as a bride to both the maharajas of Jodhpur and Jaipur.  Rather than offend either one, it was decided she should take poison to save her father the embarassment, and she did, willingly.

The next morning I got an earlier start and visited the Hindu Jagdish Temple in the cool, early morning.  There were few worshipers at that time, but there  were women vendors selling some sort of green plant, apparently for feeding the nearby cows.  At least, the nearby cows were eating it.  After breakfast on my  hotel roof, I walked to the palaces on the lake again and visited one of the new ones, built in 1909.  It has a durbar hall with three huge chandeliers, each weighing a thousand kilograms (2200 pounds).  In a gallery above the hall are displayed all sorts of crystal, including a crystal bed frame and other crystal furniture, along with thousands of glasses, cups and the like, all ordered from Birmingham by a nineteenth century maharaja.   Inexplicably, near the back of the collection were a few very big beer glasses with the legend "I Bet I Can."  As part of the 500 rupee ($11) entrance fee, very high for India, you also got a cup of tea and some cookies in the restaurant next to the durbar hall, with views of the lake.  Part of this palace is a luxury hotel.  The maharaja's current  palace is next to it, and  south of that is another palace turned luxury hotel, where Queen Elizabeth stayed when she was here.

I visited the armory museum in the old palace and then took a boat tour around the lake, passing in front of the palaces and around one of the lake palaces, Jagniwas, only open to hotel guests.  We landed on the more southern of the two lake palaces, Jagmandir, where the Moghul Emperor Jehangir's son, who later succeeded  him as Shah Jahan, lived in exile after leading a rebellion against his father until he succeeded him.  It was nice out on the lake.

I came back to my hotel and had a very late lunch (about  4 pm) and then walked down to Lal Ghat again.  Besides the cows and washerwomen, there was a brightly turbaned, grandly-mustached man playing a stringed instrument.  It was quite interesting to watch how he handled the  bow and moved his fingers on only one of the strings.  He played Indian music and every once in a while broke into "Frere Jacques."   Another tune sounded familiar, and I later decided, almost certainly incorrectly, that it was the theme song to the early 1960's, or maybe late 1950's sitcom, the Real McCoys ("This is about a family known as the Real McCoys . . . .  With Grandpappy Amos and the boys and the girls of the family known as the Real McCoys").

That night I went to an hour long performance of Rajasthani folk dancing, which was both colorful and interesting.  One woman danced with a pile of big water pots on her head that stacked on top of each other in total were much higher than her height.  Afterward, during dinner on the hotel rooftop I heard  gunfire and car crashes coming from an area higher on the roof.  I investigated after I finished and caught the end of the Roger Moore era James Bond movie Octopussy, filmed in large part in Udaipur.

I hired a car and a driver the next day and left at 9 heading north to Kumbalgarh, a massive fortress.  We had a very nice drive through the Aravalli Hills of a little more than two hours to get there.  We passed lots of women in the fields and along the narrow roads in colorful Rajasthani dress.  Wheat was just beginning to sprout in some fields and there was also sugarcane and  mustard seed (also called rape, used to make cooking oil).  Kumbalgarh was a great place, in a deserted mountainous area at about 3500 feet elevation.  Its walls, partly restored, run for twenty miles in circumference and enclose an area now mostly deserted.  The main citadel and various temples remain.  There are great views.

We spent about two hours there and then headed through the hills to the Jain temples at Ranakpur.   It took us maybe an hour and a half of driving, plus an extra half hour or so for lunch, to get there.  There are three temples, one of which is especially nice.  It has 1444 pillars, each pillar carved differently from the others.  The carvings were not as intricate or beautiful as at Dilwara near Mount Abu, but it was a much more peaceful place, without the  hordes of Indian tourists.  We spent an hour or so at the temples and then headed back to Udaipur.  It took more than two hours, arriving about 7.  I discovered that it is even more harrowing to drive after dark in India than during the daytime.  I got back to the hotel  and watched Octopussy on the roof.  It did indeed have many scenes filmed in Udaipur.  I enjoyed it for about an hour and then the increasing cold on the roof and the increasing improbability ot the plot (never the strong point of James Bond movies) made it less entertaining.  I was quite cold when it finished, went down to my warmer room (but only 63 degrees) and soon went to bed.

I was tired the next morning (today) and have spent the day doing very little.  I did take a short walk in the late afternoon around town and down to Lal Ghat, where a couple of the cows, or more likely young bulls, were butting heads, scattering the crowd.  I am getting a bit weary, after more than five months in India.  I am looking forward to my flight from Delhi to Bangkok, and warmer weather, in about three weeks, but I am also looking forward to the stops on my way back to Delhi from Udaipur.