November 16 -22, 2011: Saipan to Bangkok to Calcutta

I'm back in India for another tour around the country.  I'm not sure how long I'll be here this time, but unlike last year, I doubt I'll stay for the full 180 days allowed by my visa.  India is a fascinating place, but can be very exasperating.  Plus, it starts to get hot in late March.

I left Saipan November 16 on a 4:30 flight to Guam, followed by another flight to Tokyo and then a third to Bangkok, arriving in Bangkok about 3:30 in the afternoon (6:30 in Saipan).  Descending into Bangkok I saw lots of water, though I couldn't tell if it was caused by flooding.  On the way into town I did see a few flooded roads, but most were dry.  There were sandbags around quite a few buildings in the city.  After I got my hotel, I walked over to the Chao Phraya River and it was very high, with sandbags preventing it from leaking into the streets.  The river ferries were all closed down.  Tired, I went to bed early.

The next morning my flight to Calcutta left about 11, and I had very good views of the flooding north of Bangkok.  From the air you could see big brown smudges of water.  On the way we flew over the Irrawaddy Delta in Burma, a maze of waterways, and eventually over the much larger Ganges Delta.  Arriving about noon in Calcutta after a two and a half hour flight, I took a bus into the city center and my first reaction on being back in India was "Look at all the garbage!" on the way into town.  Bangkok was so clean and modern.  I found a hotel in the backpacker section, near the much grubbier hotel where I stayed in 1979, and then walked into the Maidan, the big, grassy park in the middle of town.  It's not the nicest park, but there were people playing cricket and soccer and flying kites.  Also, some horses and goats.  The sun set before 5 and it was dark soon after 5.  Again, I went to bed early.

The next morning I got up very early and walked through the uncrowded early morning streets.  There is always so much to see in India while just wandering the streets.  And in Calcutta are the last man-pulled rickshaws, and I saw plenty of them. (I've read these guys seldom survive much past age 30.)  Plus, there were people sleeping on the streets, a man delivering bunches of bananas on his head, and all sorts of make-shift stalls on the sidewalks.  It's never easy to walk on the sidewalks.  I walked to the Sir Samuel Hogg Market (1874, it says on the brick facade), also called the New Market, where there must have been a hundred people sleeping in the open space in front.  The main part of the market was not yet open, but the butchers' section was quite busy.  It seemed quite medieval inside, with men butchering goats and some water buffalo on sections of wide tree trunks.  Very filthy in there, with dogs all around.  I went over to the poultry section, with hundreds of chickens, and even some ducks, in wicker baskets.  Some were being tied by the feet and attached to bicycles for delivery.  And then to breakfast. 

After breakfast I walked through the Maiden again, past a herd of goats, a guy defecating into a ditch and a happy couple who told me they were in love and wanted me to take their photo.  I made my way to St. Paul's Cathedral, built in the 1840's and containing lots of interesting memorial plaques inside.  Nearby is the huge, white Victoria Memorial, built from 1906 to 1921 and described in one of my guidebooks as a cross between the U. S. Capitol and the Taj Mahal.  It is quite a beautiful building in beautiful gardens, with a statue of a forbidding looking Queen Victoria in front.  Inside are some imposing halls, with various statues, displays and an excellent museum on the history of Calcutta. (Calcutta, by the way, is now officially Kolkata.  Three of India's four largest cities -- Calcutta, Bombay and Madras, but not Delhi -- were founded by the British and all have been officially renamed in recent years, although it seems most people use the old names.)  I ended up spending more than four hours at the Victoira Memorial and its gardens.  Even had a small lunch in the garden canteen.  I walked back through the Maidan just as the sun was setting.

The next morning I again set off early and walked toward the center of town, passing lots of magnificent old colonial era buildings in various degrees of decrepitude (mostly advanced degrees).  Calcutta was the capital of British India until New Delhi was completed in 1931 and the former palace of the Viceroys is now the residence of the state governor.  It is a massive building modeled after some great house in England and is closed to the public.  I walked over to St. John's Church, built in the 1780's.  In the yard is the mausoleum of the East India Company trader who established the trading outpost here in 1690 and a few other decrepit graves.  There is also the memorial to those who died in the Black Hole of Calcutta, moved to the graveyard in 1940 from its previous location where the deaths occurred in 1756.  The Nawab of Mushidabad had captured Calcutta from the British and stuffed the survivors into a small room.  It is disputed how many of them died in the airless, close confines.  The church itself had massive Corinthian columns inside and the ceiling must have been 40 feet high. I met a guy inside who showed me the 1905 Hamilton piano from Chicago and demonstrated the 1830 organ, run now by an electric motor that sparked as he turned in on.  The organ sounded magnificent and he showed me the works behind it.  Again, there were lots of interesting plaques to be read inside.  Lots of people dying in their 20's and 30's and 40's. 

From there I walked to what was formerly known as Dalhousie Square, after a Governor General who served from 1848 to 1856 (there were no viceroys until 1977, when Victoria was proclaimed Empress of India) and is now officially known as BBD Square in remembrance of three guys who tried (but bungled) an assassination attempt on a British official in 1930.  It is huge square, with a tank (as reservoirs are called in India) on the south side.  This is the heart of the city and the tank is filthy, with garbage all around.  Nonetheless, people were bathing and washing clothes in it.  On the north side of the square is the enormous Writer's Building, built in 1780, but redone a century later, for housing the clerks (then called "writers") of the East India Company.  Now it is the West Bengal state government building and closed to the public.  I had lunch a block or so east of the square.  I couldn't find any restaurant, so settled for one of the many sidewalk vendors.  I had fried rice with a little chicken and an egg while sitting on a little wooden bench.  Later I drank a couple of coconuts sold by street vendors to quench my thirst.  It has not been very hot here, with highs in the mid 80's (a little less than 30 celsius).  It's dry, too.  The monsoon is long past. 

I walked back to the square and went into the huge, white, domed General Post Office Building on the west side of the square.  The original fort was in this area, with the Black Hole of Calcutta in its southwest bastion. After the British retook the city in 1757, they built a new fort further south and cleared the jungle all around it, creating the grassy Maidan.  I walked over to the wide Hooghly (now spelled Hugli) River, which flows from the Ganges to the sea, and then to the former Town Hall, modeled after a medieval building in Belgium and now a museum.  From there, after a long day of walking, I headed back to dinner and my hotel.

The next morning was Sunday and, hoping for a slow day for traffic, I again headed downtown.  I found a couple of old synagogues, now closed and not in good repair.  Calcutta used to have something like 30,000 Jews, mostly originally from Baghdad, but not many now.  There was a mass at the Portuguese built Catholic church, with only about 50 attendees, including a couple of nuns in the distinctive white saris with blue trimming of Mother Teresa's order.  I went to an Armenian church, but it was closed, with a notice about a Sunday service at another Armenian church.  It did have very interesting Armenian language tombstones all around it.  I then went to the city's largest mosque, with maybe four stories of prayer halls, but few worshipers that morning.  I then found the old Chinese section of the city, though most of the Chinese were chased out at the time of the 1962 war with China.  (The Chinese introduced the rickshaw a little more than a century ago.)  In front of a former Chinese restaurant in a once grand building was a huge pile of trash, with several women searching it for something worth taking.  Nearby on the sidewalks were some pretty demoralizing hovels, some barely big enough for one person, with women cooking outside. 

I headed further north and made my way to the Marble Palace, built for a maharajah in 1835.  It is an extremely opulent place, filled with statues and paintings and furniture.  Two large moose heads adorn the entrance and there were dozens of statues, mostly allegorical (the four seasons, the four continents, dawn and dusk, and so forth) and in which the nude female form was well represented.  There were also three statues of Queen Victoria (fortunately, none of them nude), including one carved out of a single piece of rosewood more ten feet high.  There were also statues of Napoleon and Wellington, on horseback at opposite sides of the long sitting room.  Plus, George Washington, St. Sebastian and others.  The paintings included, so they claimed, those of Rubens, Murillo and Reynolds.   Outside in the park were cages of birds, including the most colorful pheasants I've ever seen, deer and a poor monkey acting very strangely.  I wonder if he has been driven mad by his horrendous little cage.  From there, I walked a little further north to a museum in the former home of Rabindranath Tagore, the Bengali poet who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913.  It was quite an interesting and very large house. 

Walking further north, I finally reached the Kumartuli neighbor, where sculptors (kumars) make idols out of clay over straw molded in the shape of gods.  It was very interesting to watch them do so.  Many are puchased and them immersed in the river, to melt away.  I met two Bengali guys who spoke good English and walked around with them, reaching the wide Hooghly, at least a half mile wide. Only a few ferries were plying the river.  It was getting close to dusk, so I took a ricketty, old, but not crowded, tram back to near my hotel, a ride of half an hour and an interesting way to see the city.

The next morning I walked to the Hooghly and took a ferry upriver to the huge Howrah train station on the other side. The sky, as always, was very hazy.  Calcutta has terrible air quality.  I looked around the station and then crossed the Howrah bridge that crosses the Hooghly.  Finished in 1943, there wasn't too much vehicle traffic, but what there was made the bridge vibrate quite a bit. Lots of pedestrians, a steady stream, were using the bridge, including dozens of men carrying big bundles or boxes on their heads. On the other side, near the foot of the bridge, is a big flower market, with mostly orange and yellow marigolds, most of them offerred in long, wide garlands.  I walked through and ended on Mulick Ghat, with a great view of the bridge. Bathers were in the river and a holy man was conducting a puja, a prayer offerring, for a young man who had just shaved his head.  A barber was shaving another man on the steps nearby.  An old, apparently sick, woman was being massaged by another woman. 

I watched all the activity for a while and then took a tram and then Calcutta's 1980's Russian-built subway south to near the Kali temple in an area called Kalighat.  This is another of those places, like Kangra in the north that I visited last years, where parts of Sati, or Kali as she is also known, landed after her dead body was cut up into 51 pieces and flung all over India.  Here, a little toe landed, though it is not clear to me if it is the left or the right one.  In Kangra it was the left breast.  The temple was not all that interesting, though there were worshipers flinging flowers at the image of Kali.  Goats are supposed to be sacrified here, and I did see what appeared to be freshly butchered goat meat in a bloody corner of the temple precincts.  Supposedly, in recent years the goats have replaced human sacrifices.  Next door is a hostal run by Mother Teresa's nuns and I saw one of them in habit.  Apparently, lots of poor Indians used to come to this holy area, and perhaps still do, to die.  Nearby, is a garbage filled little creek where on the steps above it a couple was being married, the bride with elaborately hennaed hands.  I talked with the friendly brother of the groom and his daughter, from Lucknow, who spoke excellent English. 

I took the subway north and had lunch and then walked to the Park Street Cemetary, filled with hundreds of quite substantial tombs, with obelisks and columns and the like, under big trees.  Many are restored, but are still in some disrepair.  It was quite a nice, peaceful place.  From there I walked north to Mother Theresa's headquarters, where she lived and where she is now buried in a simple white tomb in the front room of the building, with traffic noise outside.  On the tomb were her name, birth and death dates, and in marigold petals below the words "Possessing Nothing Only Jesus."  It got dark as I visited the small but interesting museum.  Her bed room is preserved and you can look into it.

The next morning I walked around a bit, in particular watching the rickshaw traffic.  Lots of kids were being taken to school by rickshaw.  At 10 I went to the Indian Museum in a grand old colonial building with lofty halls, perhaps 30 feet high.  There is some great sculpture, but most of the exhibits are pretty dusty. There is a very impressive skeleton of a elephant eleven feet high at the shoulder, with some pretty big, but smaller, elephant skeletons around him.  After two or three hours I left and had lunch and then took the subway a couple of stops south (for a fare of eight cents) and walked to the museum in the house of Subhas Chandra Bose, an independence leader who fought with the Japanese against the British on the India-Burma border.  That pretty much wrapped up my sightseeing and I headed back to my hotel.

February 11 - 15, 2011: Sihanoukville - Krong Koh Kong - Bangkok - Saipan

I left Kampot about 11 on the morning of the 11th on a minibus bound for Sihanoukville further west on the coast.  Kampot was a very pleasant town and I probably would have stayed longer there if I didn't have a flight to catch in three days.  We had some good views of forested Bokor Mountain on the way.  It took less than two hours to reach Sihanoukville and the minibus let us off about a block from the main beach.  Sihanoukville was founded only in the 1950's to provide Cambodia with a port after independence.  During French colonial rule most trade had passed through Vietnam.  It is still the country's main port and is also the country's main beach resort. 

I found a hotel about three blocks from the beach and had lunch and spent time in an intenet cafe before making it to the beach about 4:30, after the heat of middle of the day.  This beach, called Ochheuteal, stretches for something like four kilometers, or about two and a half miles, along the coast.  It's not very wide, not even 100 feet, but has nice white sand.  The end closest to the city center is called Serendipity Beach and was full of people, thousands of them, both foreigners and Cambodians.  The beach in places was covered with chaise lounges and chairs and there were jet skis in the water.  Lining the beach are dozens of rather well-built restaurants and bars with grass roofs and they were fairly crowded.  I walked along the beach from one end to the other and it took me a little less than an hour each way.  The far end of the beach was almost deserted and ended at a river mouth and, beyond that, a rocky headland.  While I was walking, the sun diappeared into the haze on the horizon about 6:10.  After dark, I sat on a very comfortable padded chair on the beach with a nice breeze blowing and had a great dinner of barbecued baracuda, shrimp and squid, plus french fries and salad, for only $3.  Plus, the draft beer was only 50 cents a glass. 

I got up the next morning and watched CNN in my room for a while covering Mubarak's resignation and then went to the beach for breakfast.  It was a cloudy morning and after breakfast I walked along the beach a bit before returning to my hotel.  I had an early lunch on the beach about 11-11:30 and left about 12:30 on a bus I thought was bound for Krong Koh Kong further on the coast to the west, near the border with Thailand.  However, the bus was headed to Phnom Penh and after about two hours let the four of us bound for Krong Koh Kong off at a roadside restaurant where we had to wait for almost two hours for a bus coming from Phnom Penh and heading to Krong Koh Kong.  We didn't get there until 8 o'clock.  The road to Krong Koh Kong is fairly new and used to have four ferry crossings, now replaced with bridges.  It passes through forest and I enjoyed seeing the dense forest and the waterways along the road until it got dark about 6:30.  After dark, I could still see some of the trees in the moonlight. 

I got up about 7 the next morning and looked around town, but there wasn't much to see.  I walked to the riverfront along the wide river on the west side of town.  It looked like it might be a mile wide, but the riverfront itself wasn't very nice.  I had breakfast and about 9:30 took a motorcyle taxi to the border, only about five miles away after crossing the long bridge across the river.  The Cambodian side of the border was lined with several fancy hotels, probably also casinos, but they didn't seem very busy.  Getting through the border formalities took little time.  I joined with four other tourists and took a songthaew, a pick-up with seats in the back under a canopy, to Trat, about an hour an a half away.  We passed more forest on the way, with views of the sea here and there.  It rained a bit just before we reached Trat, a little after 11:30.  I had a very good lunch of noodles and squid at the bus station while it rained very hard.  About 12:45 I left in a minivan bound for Bangkok.  We had some rain at first, but soon it cleared up and we made good time on Thailand's modern highways.  It was a Sunday afternoon, so when we reached Bangkok there wasn't as much traffic as on a workday.  By 6:30 I had checked into the hotel in the Banglamphu area where I had made a reservation before heading to Cambodia.  As before, the area was full of foreign tourists.  I had a good dinner and went to bed about 10 but didn't get much sleep.

I got up at 2:30 am and left in a cab for the airport at 3.  My plane left shortly before 6 and landed in Narita (Tokyo) a little more than five hours later, about 1 pm Tokyo time.  My plane to Saipan left about 8 pm.  I spent the interim in Delta's lounge eating, reading newspapers and using the internet.  We landed in Saipan soon after midnight, about 12:30.  Good to be back.

February 6 - 10, 2011: Kompong Thom, Phnom Penh and Kampot

I left Siem Reap on the 6th on a 10 am bus heading southeast to Phnom Penh, but got off three hours later at the small town of Kompong Thom, about halfway to Phnom Penh.  I checked into a very nice hotel ($6/night and very comfortable; the budget hotels here in Cambodia are very good) and had a good lunch at the friendly and busy restaurant next door and about 2 left with a moto (a motorcycle taxi) heading for the Sambor Prei Kuk, about 20 miles and an  hour's ride to the north.  The ride was quite interesting and scenic, through the Cambodian countryside on dusty red roads.  We passed several villages with no electricity and with wooden houses on stilts.  There were few cars, but bikes and motorcycles and even a few ox carts.  Sambor Prei Kuk is a pre-Angkorian site from the 7th century, a construction of what is called the Chenla Civilization.  I spent about two hours there exploring the remains of brick temples in the forest.  The temples are nothing to compare to Angkor, but the setting in the forest in the late afternoon was nice.  One temple gateway was completely overgrown by a tree, the roots encompassing all the remnants of the arch of bricks.  There were a few tourists there, but not many.  I got back to town about 6 after an enjoyable ride back, passing lots of friendly kids.  I was quite dusty from the ride and had to wash my shirt, shorts and daypack (and, of course, myself)..  I had CNN on the television in my hotel room and stayed up till 11 watching it, including its live Sunday morning (in the U.S.) talk shows.

About 9:30 the next morning I left on a bus for Phnom Penh, reaching it after three hours after crossing a new bridge over the Tonle Sap River north of the city.  I checked into the hotel I had stayed in last year, had lunch and then spent the afternoon at the National Museum, with its great collection of Khmer sculpture.  It is a very nice museum, with a great courtyard where I relaxed after going through the musem until the museum closed at 5.  I then walked along the riverfront, past the royal palace and then south along the Tonle Sap River.  The Mekong flows into Phnom Penh from the northeast and splits into three branches, two heading southeast to Vietnam and the Mekong Delta and one heading northwest to the Tonle Sap lake.  During the wet season the Tonle Sap River flows from Phnom Penh to the lake but during the dry season the flow is reversed, partially draining the lake.

I didn't do much the next morning and left on a 12:30 bus for Kampot on the coast.  There are other things worth seeing in Phnom Penh, including the Royal Palace and Silver Pagoda, and the S-21 Museum, a former prison of the Khmer Rouge, but I was running out of time before my flight from Bangkok and had visited both places last year (and in 1994).  Last year I had seven weeks to explore Laos and Cambodia and spent more than five of those weeks in Laos, leaving me only ten days for Cambodia.  I spent that time visiting three places (Ban Long, Kratie, where you can see Mekong River dolphins, and Kompong Chom) in the northeast, Phnom Penh and Siem Reap, with three days at Angkor.  In 1994 I visited only Phnom Penh, a few sites outside Phnom Penh, and Siem Reap and the road via Battambang between Phnom Penh and Siem Reap.  They were the only places safe enough, and the road between the two cities wasn't entirely safe.

The bus ride south was quite comfortable on a very modern air-conditioned bus, but with loud and violent Asian (Chinese, I think, but dubbed into Cambodian) videos.  We passed palm trees and rice fields and reached the coastal town of Kep about 4:30.  In Kep we drove right along the oceanfront for a while and it was good to see the ocean again.  Kep was a resort town in the 1960's and there are remains of big concrete houses destroyed in the war. 

From Kep we drove further along the coast, but inland a bit, and reached Kampot about 5:15.  I checked into another nice hotel and walked to the riverfront.  Kampot is only a few miles upriver from the sea and has a very nice riverfront with a newly paved promenade lined with casuarina trees, one of which has almost completely succumbed to a strangler fig.  On the other side of the street along the river are old French colonial buildings, in various states of disrepair for the most part, though some have been refurbished.  The river here is quite wide, maybe 750-1000 feet, I think.  In fact, I think it is an estuary.  I walked along the riverfront promenade at dusk.  There is an old French-era bridge to the north and further north a newer bridge.  There were lots of people out on the riverfront at dusk.  After it got dark I had dinner at a riverside restaurant in the garden of a colonial building now a hotel and restaurant.

I got up early the next morning and walked along the riverfront.  There wasn't much activity except at the far southern end of the promenade, towards the sea, where four or five fishing boats, all painted green and maybe 40 feet in length, had tied up along the muddy bank and were off-loading fish.  Actually, there wasn't much fish, mostly crabs, shrimp, calamari (and maybe octopus, as some of the water in the basins was very inky) and maybe even some lobsters.  Great baskets were carried from the boats to the shore and the catch was being cleaned by several women in metal or plastic basins.  It was all quite interesting to watch.  Baskets were loaded onto motorcycles or onto motorized canoes for delivery upriver.  The fishing boats headed downriver after off-loading, perhaps to return to the sea.  Soon after 8 all the activity had ceased and the area was deserted except for the detritus of the market.  I walked around town a bit afterward, mainly to see the old French colonial buildings in the old city center and then returned to my hotel for a late breakfast.

I spent most of the middle of the day relaxing at the  hotel, which had a nice garden restuarant, and then about 3:30 took a moto about 5 miles north on another dirt road to Phnom Chhnork, a limestone hill ("phnom" means "hill") with a cave,  Inside the cave is a small brick temple dedicated to Shiva dating from the 7th century, a construction of the Funan Civilization.  Protected by the cave, it is well preserved, with a stalagmite about two feet high serving as the linga.  Much longer and more impressive stalactites hang down from the cave's roof into the top of the temple.  In the fields around the hill cows were grazing on the rice stubble.  Patches of vegetables (onions were all I recognized) next to a pond were being watered by men and women with large (several gallons, I would guess) water buckets with spouts, which they toted between the pond and the vegetable patches using yokes on their shoulders.  Back in town, I walked to the riverfront and watched the sun set into the hills to the west.  The wind picks up in the afternoon and it is very pleasant along the river.

The next morning about 8 I left in a minivan heading to Bokor National Park in the hills to the west.  Bokor Hill is 1080 meters, or about 3500 feet, in elevation.  The French built a road up to the plateau on top in 1917-1921, using convict labor, and built a hill resort up there in the 1920's.  It was abandoned twice, first in World War II, though the Japanese army was there, and then in 1972, due to the Khmer Rouge.  The old road is being redone and is expected to be finished in five or six months, we were told by our guide.  There is a plan to build five star hotels up there. 

We drove only maybe 7 miles up the new road, to about 1600 feet, according to my altimeter, and began a beautiful walk through the jungle.  The trail was a little steep in places, but it was a very enjoyable walk.  There were 28 people in our group, but I was able to space myself so that I mainly walked alone.  With so many hikers and the construction activity, there isn't much wildlife along the path, though I did hear birds and insects.  We climbed for a little over an hour and a half, ascending about 1100 feet, to 2700 feet, about 800 feet below the plateau.  From there we rejoined our vehicles and reached the ruins of an old casino on the plateau about noon.  We looked around the four story building, with everything ripped out of it.  There are even gouges in the cement walls where the electric wiring was ripped out.  There is lots of bright orange lichen on the walls. We had lunch on the entry steps and then looked around some more.  The backside of the casino has a terrace on the cliff facing the sea.  You can stand on the cliff edge and hear the hum of insects and the chattering of birds below.  Wispy clouds were shooting up the cliffs towards the plateau.  Bokor is known for its cool weather and its fog.  It wasn't foggy, but the cool breeze felt delightful.  I walked all through and around the old casino, which was a battle scene when the Vietnamese invaded Cambodia in 1979 and deposed the Khmer Rouge.  The Khmer Rouge hung on in the jungles here longer than in some other places.  I walked along the plateau, visiting some other deserted buildings and ending up at the old church.  From there we boarded our vehicles again and headed down about 2 or 2 :30, with a shorter afternoon trek, less than an hour and a descent of about 800 feet. 

We got back to Kampot about 4 and at 4:30 boarded boats for a very pleasant cruise up the river and then back.  We went upriver for about 40 minutes, passing palm trees, both sugar palms and coconuts palms, riverside houses and green painted fishing boats.  Small fish, maybe only two inches in length, jumped out out the way of the wake of our boat and at one point a whole school of them, scores of little fish, jumped out of the water brieflly in unison several times.  We had good views of the Bokor Hills to the west, and watched the sun set over them shortly before 6  It was a very pleasant way to end the day.  Our smiling boatman steered the boat with his feet on the rebar tiller while lounging to the side.  Reaching the riverfront in Kampot about 6, I strolled along the promenade until dark and then had dinner in a riverside restaurant.  I noticed the bright planet I had first noticed in the eastern sky just after sunset in Zanskar in September was still in the sky, though now far to the west in the sky after sunset.

January 28 - February 5, 2011: Battambang, Siem Reap and Angkor

I got up at 6 on the 28th in preparation for a 7 am departure for the Cambodian border, but we didn't get going until about 8 after picking up tourists at several guesthouses.  It took about an hour for our minivan to get through Bangkok's morning traffic and another three hours of travel through the flat, now dry, rice lands east of  Bangkok before we reached the Cambodian border at Poipet.  There were quite a few people, both tourists and locals, coming and going and it took over an hour and a half to take care of the border formalities.  The Thai side was quick, but on the Cambodian side I had to buy a visa (for $20, plus a suspicious 100 baht ($3) fee) and then wait in a long line to be stamped in.  The Cambodian side of the border has casinos almost right on the border catering to Thais.  I had to deal with Poipet's infamous taxi mafia to get a ride in a share taxi to Battambang.  (Almost all the other tourists were heading directly to Siem Reap.)  I finally negotiated a $10 fee, probably about twice the real fare, and was soon on my way.  We passed first through dry countryside and then through  greener areas, filled with banana trees, just before Battambang, Cambodia's second largest city, where we arrived about 4.  I checked into a good hotel for $5/night and looked around.  The city is on a river and has quite a few attractive old French colonial buildings.  I walked along the riverfront and through side streets and had a good dinner.  There were a good number of western tourists in that friendly city.  I spent an hour or so after dinner sitting in a quiet outdoor street side bar with a guy from London on a pleasant night.

The next morning I walked around town, up the river a bit to the old French Governor's Mansion and eventually to the old train station, which seemed closed for good.  Back in 1994, when I first visited Cambodia, you could take a very slow train from Phnom Penh to Battambang and ride for free in the first few carriages because they were the ones most likely to be blown up, or at least derailed, by mines set by the remnants of the Khmer Rouge.  Nearby some kids were playing a gambling game with a plastic basin and three dice, using very small bills, worth two and half cents, for their wagers.  Two of the older ones hid their faces when I took a photo.

I had a long breakfast and about noon took a tuktuk (a motorcycle with a comfortable open-air carriage attached) on a tour of the countryside.  First, we headed just a few miles out of town to a place where you catch the so-called "bamboo train."  This mode of transportation began in the early post-Khmer Rouge days when the roads were terrible.  The bamboo trains consist of two sets of old train wheels (each set consisting of two wheels linked by an axle).  Over these is placed a bamboo platform that hooks onto the axles.  Attached to the bamboo platform in a small motor that powers the contraption.  Another tourist who was waiting there when I arrived and I set off down the warped, wobbly tracks, with the motor man behind us.  You don't go that fast, but it is exciting since you are so low and close to the tracks, somewhat like riding on a cowcatcher, I guess.  When you meet a bamboo train coming the other way, which we did several times in our half hour excursion, the one with the lightest load gets pulled off the tracks, first the bamboo platform and motor, then the wheels, and then is reassembled after the heavier load passes.  It was great fun.  After a half hour stop at a small village, we traveled back the way we had come.  The scenery was interesting, with mostly dry rice stubble, but several ponds, one with ducks and one with people fishing with nets and poles.

After the train ride, we headed south to a hill called Phnom Sambeau, about 300 feet above the flat plains.  I climbed it and looked around the various temples, some honoring the victims of the Khmer Rouge, with a shrine full of the victims' bones next to it.  There were good views over the country from the top.  From there we headed to another hill, Phnom Banan, with five Khmer towers on top.  I climbed it, too, a climb of only about 250 feet.  The  towers are in a fairly ruinous state, but the place was peaceful in the late afternoon, with good views.  Red "Danger Mines" were posted all around the hillside, restricting  you to the safe stairs up and down.  These signs were all over Angkor when I first visited it in 1994.  I enjoyed traveling in the tuktuk, sort of a fresh air taxi, through the countryside, passing villages and fields.  We got back to town about 5:30 or 6, just before nightfall.

The next morning at 7:15 I left on the boat, with maybe 25 passengers, bound for Siem Reap.  It felt cold in the early morning as we came down the narrow river, with much activity to be seen along the banks -- washing, fishing, agriculture and villages.  About 9 I wised up and sat on the roof, where it was warmer in the sun than in the boat under the roof.  I stayed up there until about 11 as we passed through a very narrow stretch of the river, bumping the river bed several times.  The wakes of boats caused little fish, only two or three inches in length, to leap out of the water.  I saw one land on a small wooden boat tied to the bank and leap around several times until it regained the river and safety.  We had a half an hour stop for lunch at a little shop with good rice and chicken and vegetables and then reached a much wider portion of the river, maybe 300 or 400 feet compared to maybe 30 feet at its narrowest earlier on.  About 3 we finally reached Tonle Sap, the enormous lake in the middle of Cambodia.  We crossed its western end for maybe 45 minutes, with only a faint view of the shoreline to the west and north and no view at all in other directions.  We eventually reached a river on the northwest bank, went up it a short distance and docked about 4.  A tuktuk took me to Siem Reap, where I checked into the same very nice hotel I had stayed in last year, for only $6/night.  I talked to some of the staff there about travel to the outlying temples and had a good dinner.  They have excellent Cambodian fish dishes, with garlic, or coconut milk and curry, or pineapple.  I was tired, after too many early morning departures (Delhi, Bangkok, Battambang) in the past few days and went to bed about 8:30.

I got up the next morning after 7 and spent a leisurely day.  I read my guidebook and planned my itinerary (which has subsequently been revised and is likely to be revised again) and rested.  In the late afternoon I took a walk around town, first to the gardens in front of the 1929 Grand Hotel d'Angkor.  I went into the hotel and looked around.  In the "Celebrity Bar" were photos of Charlie Chaplin (I think), W. Somerset Maugham, and Jackie Kennedy.  There were were several of Jackie Kennedy, most with Prince Sihanouk with her taken during her mid 1960's visit to Siem Reap and Angkor.  When I first came to Siem Reap in 1994 this hotel was boarded up waiting renovation, which occurred in 1995-1997, according to a plaque.  Siem Reap itself wasn't much in 1994.  It was so nondescript that I hardly remember it.  Now it is filled with fancy hotels and restaurants, a huge chance from 1994.  I walked along the river, passing a new, or newly renovated, wat, to the old market area, now in the middle of restaurants and bars and shops catering to tourists.  The town seems to be almost completely given over to tourism, but still seems a  pleasant place.

The next morning I got up at 5:45 and was biking my way to Angkor by 6:15.  I stopped at the guard post to buy a three day pass for $40 and passed Angkor Wat about 6:45.  I continued north, going through the monumental old south gate of Angkor Thom, the former Khmer capital city, and reached the Bayon temple, at the center of Angkor Thom, about 7.  Angkor Thom covers a huge area, several square kilometers, but all that remains are the walls, gates and the stone religious buildings inside.  Everything else, including the royal palace, was made of wood and is gone, with only forest covering the grounds.  It was quite enjoyable to pedal through in the early morning, under the giant trees, with monkeys on the roadside.  The Bayon is a Buddhist temple at the center of Angkor Thom, with 216 giant, half-smiling faces of the bodhisattva Avalokiteshvara on its 54 towers.  It wasn't very crowded when I first got there and I enjoyed watching the faces get lit up by the rising sun.  I spent about two hours there, the last part walking past the great bas-reliefs on the first level.  There were huge crowds pouring in when I left at 9.

I biked north to a spot near the Terrace of Elephants and had breakfast and then biked further north, out the north gate of Angkor Thom, to the Preah Khan temple, where I spent a couple of hours looking around.  I walked along its outer wall, with few other tourists around, and then through the temple itself.  It was midday and hot in the sun, but not bad in the shade of the trees or of the temple.  I biked back to the place I had eaten breakfast to get lunch, then biked south past the Bayon and Angkor Thom's south gate to Phnom Bakheng, a hill with a temple on it just south of Angkor Thom.  I climbed the hill and then the temple for the views over the countryside.  It was a little cloudy, but the views were pretty good.  I could see the towers of Angkor Wat to the southeast but I couldn't see any of the ruins of Angkor Thom just to the north.  All I could see was the jungle canopy.  I walked down the hill on a path with elephants ferrying tourists up and down the hill, and biked the short distance south to Angkor Wat.  I parked and crossed the causeway over the wide moat and entered the west gate.  There were masses of tourists coming out. From the entrance gate there is a long stone procession way to the temple itself.  I walked about halfway down, to a set of stone buildings along the procession way, but didn't have the energy to battle the crowds in the temple itself.  I sat there enjoying the view for half an hour or so, although the facade is covered with scaffolding and green mesh, as it was last year when I was here.  In fact, it seems to have spread.  It was now late in the afternoon, so I returned to my bike and pedaled back to town and my hotel, arriving about 6, just before dark.

I got up at 6 the next morning and at 6:30 left on a tuktuk for Angkor.  It was cold on the tuktuk that early in the morning.  We reached Ta Prohm, east of Angkor Thom, about 7 and I went in.  There weren't many tourists there for the first half hour and I enjoyed walking around, mostly by myself, as birds, mostly parrots, chirped in the trees.  Ta Prohm, unlike almost all the other temples at Angkor, has mostly been left unreconstructed, giving it a "lost in the jungle" look.   This temple was my favorite spot when I first visited Angkor in 1994.  Back then there were far fewer tourists (maybe one per cent of what there are now?) and you were allowed to rent a motorbike to visit the sites.  I spent seven days at Angkor that year and most mornings I would get up in the dark, leave at first light and go to Ta Prohm.  Almost no one would be there early in the morning and you were allowed to climb all over.  I would climb up on a roof with a good view of the massive trees growing on the temple roofs and eat the breakfast I had brought with me, a baguette with cheese and tomatoes, while monkeys played in the trees and the birds chirped away.  (Back then there were no restaurants or food stalls at Angkor.  You had to bring food from Siem Reap or return there for meals.)  I was so disappointed to see how Ta Prohm had been transformed when I came here last year after 16 years.  Construction activity was going on, and is still going on.  Wooden walkways have been built to guide you through the ruins that previously seemed to be left to nature, and there are little wooden platforms to allow tourists to pose next to the most photogenic tree roots fastened to the masonry.  Of course, you are no longer allowed to climb up on the roofs.  I suppose it is all necessary given the massive crowds visiting now, but it is still disappointing.  But being there early in the morning this year was enjoyable.  The first group arrived at 7:30 and when I left at 9 they were pouring in.  I would say there are as many, if not more, Asian tourists, as western ones.

From Ta Prohm, we headed to a restaurant opposite the Eastern Mebon on the eastern side of Angkor, and then headed north about 20 miles to a temple called Banteay Srei.  I had gone there in 1994 on my motorbike on a very dusty and sandy road, which made for very slow going with several wipeouts (which I believe is the technical term, or am I confusing motorcycling with surfboarding?) in the extremely sandy portions.  Now there is a good paved road with tourist stalls seemingly all along it.  Before, there were just quiet villages and homes with people seemingly surprised to see me.  In 1994 Banteay Srei was as far north as you could safely go, with the Khmer Rouge to the north.   I remember a soldier greeting me at the temple entrance.  Others were lounging in the shade to the side.  Now there is a huge tourist complex in front of the temple, with exhibits, restrooms, restaurants, and a massive parking lot.  There were hundreds of tourists and Banteay Srei is a small temple.  In 1994 I think I was the only one there.  Banteay Srei is famous for its delicate carving, the most delicate in the Angkor area.  I enjoyed seeing it again and was a little amazed by the change.

From there we headed further north to a hill called Kbal Speon.  We parked and I took a trail up the hill for about a mile, rising 400 or so feet through dense forest, to a river, only a trickle now in the dry season.  The river's rocky bed has many Hindu carvings -- lingas, Shiva, Vishnu and other deities. There are hundreds, maybe over a thousand, carved lingas in the riverbed.  It was all very scenic and pleasant in the forest gloom despite being mid afternoon.  From there we headed back south to the Angkor area, stopping at Banteay Samre, an interesting temple to the east of the others with two walls around it, and a now dry moat between the two walls. It was almost deserted and pleasant there in the late afternoon.  We headed back to town, arriving just after 6 and catching the sunset reflected on a pool on the way back.

The next morning I again got up at 6 and left on a tuktuk at 6:30.  We reached Angkor Wat about 15 minutes later and I spent four and a half hours there.  I entered through the quieter eastern gate, passing the large trees on the route.  Quite a few monkeys were playing just east of the temple and I watched them for a while. Among them were a very young baby with his or her mother and a very fat female, perhaps pregnant.  Angkor Wat wasn't too crowded early in the morning and it was great to just wander around.  The third level was closed, though, for "cleaning."  It, too, has changed since 1994, when you could clamber all over it.  Now you can't go up the very steep stone stairs up to the third level.  You have to take a wooden staircase (when they are not "cleaning).  I finished off with a walk along the bas-reliefs on the first level and then had breakfast in the northern portion of the courtyard outside the temple.  By then the crowds were enormous.  I think they may have been bigger than usual as it was the Chinese New Year.  From Angkor Wat we headed north into Angkor Thom to the Terrace of Elephants and the royal palace area.  I got off there and spent a couple of hours in the royal palace area looking at the carved terraces and the temples among the trees.  There are a couple of stepped ponds, full of greenish water, in the royal palace precincts.  Nearby they are reconstructing the Baphuon, a temple that was the center of the capital city before Angkor Thom was built after invading Chams from Vietnam had destroyed the previous capital in 1177.

I had lunch where I'd eaten two days before, looked over some more ruins just to the east of that, and then we set off and went out the north gate of Angkor Thom, turned east and headed to Preah Neak Poan, east of Preah Khan.  This is a fountain complex, with five pools, with fountain heads in the shape of a horse, a lion, a man and an elephant.  Continuing east and then south in the late afternoon, I visited Ta Som, not much crowded and with its eastern gate crowned by a big tree growing on the stones, and then the Eastern Mebon, with stone lions at the corners of that multi-level pyramid and views of the setting sun.  The last stop was at the large pyramidal funerary temple of Pre Rup.  Big crowds were gathered there to watch the sunset.  I climbed to the top and looked around, but left before the sunset to beat the crowds on the way back to Siem Reap.  I did catch a scenic sunset on the way back reflected in a pool of water.  The moat around Angkor Wat had quite a few picnicking Cambodians on its banks (and quite a bit of their garbage left behind).  Some Cambodians have Chinese ancestry, so they may have been celebrating the new year.  There was a huge amount of traffic on the streets as we got back to town.

The next morning I left with the tuktuk at 7:30 and we made for a temple about 40 miles from Siem Reap called Beng Mealea.  It took us almost two hours to get there, the first hour on the national highway to Phnom Penh and the second on a quieter, but still paved, road.  I enjoyed the second half of the trip more in the fresh air taxi.  There were buses, vans, cars and only a few tuktuks there when we arrived.  I spent about four and a half hours there looking around.  It was cool when I first arrived, but heated up, though it was still okay in the shade.  Beng Mealea has not been reconstructed and has trees growing all over its roofs and corridors.  Fallen stones lie everywhere.  There is a wooden walkway, built for the filming of a 2004 movie called Two Brothers, my guidebook says.  The walkway is in large part elevated and affords some great views over the temple ruins.  I also clambered all over the ruins, over the massive fallen blocks, into dark corridors and up onto the walls and towers, and it was great fun.  There were quite a few people there in the late morning, including lots of groups clogging the wooden walkways.  I found my way to a deserted interior courtyard to avoid them and spent a half hour or so sitting on a block of stone and listening to the birds, chirping even at midday.  From about noon on there were few tourists, though groups were again arriving when I left about 2.  I had lunch and then we made the two hour trip back, arriving in Siem Reap about 4:30.

The next day (today) I was planning on heading north to Anlong Veng, the last  holdout of the Khmer Rouge until 1998, and hoping to go the the temple of Preah Vihear on the border with Thailand, but fighting broke out yesterday afternoon between the Cambodian and Thai armies near Preah Vihear.  I did visit Preah Vihear before, in 1992 when I approached it from the Thai side.  It was then guarded by young Khmer Rouge soldiers in tattered uniforms and flipflops, and rifles, and they and the Thais shared the entry fees.  Both Thailand and Cambodia at one time claimed Preah Vihear and the World Court resolved the matter by awarding it to Cambodia.  Thailand accepts that, although some Thai nationalists do not, but they are now disputing a 4.6 square kilometer area (a little over one square mile) nearby.  News reports say two Cambodian soldiers and one Thai villager were killed yesterday.  I checked out the travel situation last night and this morning and decided to spend the day relaxing and eating the good fish dishes at my comfortable hotel.  There are a couple of other temples I would like to visit in this part of Cambodia, Koh Ker and Preah Khan, but they are either expensive or difficult to reach.

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.