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.
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