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.
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