I had some extra leave left over nearing the end of the year, and I wanted to have a vacation before departing for yet another exercise, so I had decided to book a trip to an exotic destination. I had also decided to try going on a group tour. I had been wanting to see India for a while, and a British company,
Exodus, had several trips going there. I ended up deciding to go on a trip called
"Rajastan Desert Adventure". They had two departures fairly close together, but I chose the later one as it included a trip to the famous
Pushkar camel fair, reputedly the biggest livestock fair in Asia. It was also better aligned to the dates for my exercise in Poland in November.
Now the struggle was to get the holiday booked. Several of my colleagues had used the official agent for Exodus in Holland, Flach Travel, to book other trips. I tried sending them a couple of emails, and after a lot of emails back and forth I finally got something that looked like a confirmation that my trip was booked. Figuring that the rest of the group would be flying from Britain, I also asked him to book a hotel and flight package to connect to the tour. This turned out to be a big mistake. I asked the agent for direct flights, and he ended up booking me on a flight through Paris on the return... which was 100 euros more expensive than if I had booked the direct flights through KLM's website myself. The hotel they booked me on, the hotel where the trip started, turned out to have been booked at a rate that was 150% of the rate from the hotel's website. I'm aware of that travel agents have to make money somehow, but this was just ridiculous. I think it will be a long time before I use a travel agent again.
I had lots of trouble getting my tourist visa, mostly due to a mix of arrogance and stupidity at the embassy. It all started up with their web site declaring that you could not use the outsourced visa service as a foreigner unless you had a Verblijfsbewijs. Because of my special status in Holland, I do not have one of these, so I had to go through the regular visa procedure at the Indian embassy in The Hague. The line was not very long but it took forever, as the person at the counter seemed very keen on insulting every single person to come up to the counter. I saw 8 out of 10 people be turned away in front of me after lengthy discussions and screams of "We are the first line of defence for India!". For some reason they did not yell at me, but I spent two hours in line and waiting for my visa interview, as the visa granting officer had gone for a private errand to the bank. Upon finally getting to talk to the officer, he took a casual glance at my application, told me he saw no problem with this, and sent me back to the counter to pay my fee for getting the visa stamped. Back at the counter, the clerk refused to accept my paper for final stamping, screaming that I had to go to the outsourced visa service. After spending three hours in line to get my visa, I had to leave for the outsourced visa service. When I got there, they accepted my application and it turned out they had changed their requirement, so I no longer needed a Verblijfsbewijs to apply. The visa service, however, was spending forever processing my application. After a couple of weeks, I had to go over there and pick up my passport, because I needed it to fly to Germany. I returned it after a weekend in Munich, and finally one week later, after 20 days of processing and 95 euros in charges, my visa was ready.
My flight to India was delayed on the ground at Schiphol, because they had too few security guards to run the bag check properly. When I finally got to Delhi, I was stuck on the ground for another 40 minutes, because Delhi airport had forgotten to assign a gate to my flight. Arriving at the airport, I was unable to use the ATM. You can't change euros into rupees outside of India, so I had no rupees with me. This meant I had no rupees to pay for the taxi to the hotel. Luckily, after running around for a bit, I found a money-changing booth that would accept my euros. The hotel was pretty basic, so I was surprised it was so expensive. Turns out, the hotel standards in India are pretty low, and I would experience the full extent of this during my trip.
I had one day to myself in Delhi, so I made a quick plan for which sights I wanted to see in Delhi, and set off on a tuk-tuk from the hotel. Using the tuk-tuks to go around was not ideal. Most of them would overcharge like crazy, charging 3-4 times the basic rate for Indians. Some of them would try to trick me into hiring them for extended periods, and most of them tried to trick me into telling them which hotel I stayed at. One guy made a very persistent effort to sell me a copy of the Kama Sutra. Also, the tuk-tuks are very open, allowing you to inhale exhaust and smog from the crazy Delhi traffic. One crazy-eyed guy in a passing tuk-tuk grabbed my arm and started screaming. I was indeed a long way from home.
The touts and the tuk-tuk drivers weren't all bad. One rickshaw driver actually knew what he was doing, so he took me to the spice market, and showed me an area where they do gross sales of spice. I walked through the building, passing a lot of spice workers obviously confused by my presence, before going up to a rooftop where I had a panorama view of the market area. This driver was worth his money.
During the day I managed to visit Qutb Minar, Humayun's tomb, the Red Fort and the narrow shopping streets of the Chandri Chowk. I was also attacked by the shoeshine mafia in Connaught Place. This is a Delhi-specific scam I had read about before coming, but I had not expected it to happen to me. The scam works like this: a guy squirts dog-shit on your shoe while you're not looking, and then helpfully tells you that you have shit on your shoe. He then offers to clean it up for you, at an extortionate rate.
At Connaught Place, I had a guy run up to me from behind, tapping me on the shoulder. He told me I had shit on my shoe, and offered to clean it up for me. I knew what was going on, and I was pretty pissed off, but I figured, I had to have it cleaned off anyway. The guy did a half-assed job of cleaning it up, and then demanded 1400 rupees after cleaning it up. Normal tariff for a shoeshine in India is 10 rupees. I suddenly noticed he had a bunch of friends that had moved into position behind me. I told him this was way too much. One of the people hanging around walked up to me and "helpfully" told me that 1400 was way too much, normal rate was more like 500 rupees. I pulled out a 100 rupee note (the equivalent of 2 euros), the smallest note I had, tossed it at him and shouted that if I saw him again I would go get the police. I walked away hastily towards the safety of the inside of the shopping center, ready to run if they would try to jump me. They did not follow me inside, and when I came out again ten minutes later, they had disappeared.
Saturday morning I met up with my group, mostly British retirees. We took off and drove towards Agra, stopping for a quick stroll around the Agra Fort. It was not terribly exciting, but it did have some nice balconies where we could watch the Taj Mahal from a different angle. Our hotel was full of mosquitoes, as they kept the doors open and the lights turned on in the evening. I found this very odd in an area with malaria-risk.
Sunday morning we got up really early in order to catch
Taj Mahal at sunrise. I must say that the Taj Mahal was an attraction that's better in real life than in pictures. I really enjoyed it, and I'm happy I got to see it in the morning, you could really see the light change in just one hour, and it was vastly more captivating in the morning light. Also, you could really feel the marble effect, with the Taj sucking the heat out of the surrounding area.
We drove on to Fatehpur Sikri, looking at the ruins, before driving on to a small town just outside Ranthambore National Park.
Monday we started out really early for our first game drive in the tiger reserve at
Ranthambore National Park. We were driving around in open-topped vehicles called "Canters" and it was a very bumpy and dusty drive to get to the national park. We drove around for three hours but did not see a tiger. The terrain on the route we were taking in the morning was not ideal for tiger-spotting anyway, as it was very overgrown. We saw lots of deer and some crocodiles, though.
After our game drive, we had lunch, and went for a walk in the nearby village. We stopped at some local schools and spoke to some of the schoolchildren, which was very entertaining for some of the members of our group, as they were retired teachers.
We went for a second game drive in the evening, and this time we were more lucky. We were driving along on a route that was more open, allowing us to see more of the landscape. We saw lots of different animals, including a sloth bear, apparently rarely seen in the park. Towards the end of the game drive our driver stopped abruptly. He had noticed that the behavior of the animals had changed. We saw the animals tiptoeing around , being very skittish. Then we heard warning calls of the big sambar deer. We listened to this for maybe ten minutes before we suddenly heard the tiger roar. It really made the hairs on your neck rise up. The driver gunned the engine, and drove towards where we heard the roar like he was some sort of getaway driver for a bank robbery. I found it a bit theatrical at the time, but all in good fun. We drove to an open area close to the river where we had a good overview. Apparently, we had just missed the tiger, as the people in the other vehicles there had seen it drinking from the river. We sat around for maybe ten minutes without seeing anything before suddenly spotting something orange on the hill in front of us. I managed to get a couple of shots with my camera before it disappeared in the tall grass. We returned in triumph, having seen a tiger in the wild and we celebrated with some Indian rum and coke in the van.
Tuesday morning we started out really early, going to the pink city of Jaipur, the capital of Rajastan. We had a quick stroll around the Maharaja palace of Jaipur, but we were not all that impressed. We had lunch at a local cafe. I was not that hungry, so I only had a small naan. Turned out that was a very good decision. Probably from the meal at this cafe, one member of the group, Peta, got food poisoning, and she was out for four days...
We stayed at a rather low standard hotel in Jaipur. When we first checked in, I was convinced there were several families with children directly above us, as there was a lot of noise coming from above. It turned out it was the traditional dance performance for the freshly arrived tourists. We had a buffet dinner and were called up to dance with the performers. We would find later that this is very common in these tourist performances.
We woke up really early the next day, discovering that the hotel was next to a temple which started chanting things over loudspeakers from 5 in the morning. Today's program was visiting the Amber fort of Jaipur, a hilltop fortress, controlling the city walls of Jaipur. I remember being impressed at the size of the city walls, considering they straddled hilltops for long distances around the city. Must have taken them some time to build.
The afternoon was spent shopping in the bazaar areas of Jaipur. I bought some Christmas gifts and was properly cheated on a belt which wouldn't bend properly when I got back to The Hague. I only lost 10 euros, and I had fun haggling with the guy, so I didn't feel too bad about it.
I woke up in the middle of the night, thinking it was raining heavily, and went back to sleep. When I woke up in the morning I was puzzled. Raining in a desert city in the middle of dry season? It turned out that the big water tank on top of the hotel had sprung a leak, so there was water running down the sides of the hotel, running down the stairs, and down the elevator shaft. At least I have now stayed in the hotel with "Running water (down the walls)" ;-)
Thursday morning we drove off to see the Palace of the Winds,
Hawa Mahal (a palace that really exemplifies the concept of facade...). This is one of the main attractions in Jaipur, so there's usually lots of tourists milling around, together with the usual bunch of street sellers, snake charmers etc.. I had fun watching the snake charmers, as some of them didn't seem too proficient, and you could see the snakes lunging after passing tourists. I just hope the snakes weren't poisonous... We spent the rest of the day driving to Pushkar, the site of the camel fair we were visiting. We moved into the tent camp that would serve as our home for the duration of our stay in Pushkar, had a quick lunch, before riding camel carts into the center of Pushkar, to do an evening walk around the center and the main fairgrounds. Turns out that because of the drought this year, the holy lake had turned into more of a holy puddle. That didn't stop the Saadu hermits from sitting around the lake smoking hashish to be more spiritual. Some of them were more spiritual than others; One guy ran up to us, dropped his robe and proceeded to show us the "rolling a penis around a stick"-trick. It was a bit surreal. I took great pleasure in seeing Kali-murals, something you don't really see that often. They were there because this is the city of Brahma, and Kali was one of his two wives. It was a bit funny to hear our guide explaining that the legend said if you had two wives, you had to make sure to keep them in different locations, otherwise there would be trouble.
Our tents were about half an hour's walk from the festival grounds, so it was pretty quiet. The only things that alarmed me slightly during the night were the wild dogs running around in the camp, grunting and barking and sniffing the tent walls. We made sure to button our tents up properly after that.
Friday morning we went for walk around Pushkar. We came late in the festival, so most of the trading of livestock was already finished, but there were still people selling horses, so there were huge numbers of animals still around. Apparently, this festival had been more popular with tourists in previous years, so there weren't that many around. This made us feel singled out, as there were large numbers of really annoying street-sellers following us around. One guy followed us for 20 minutes! We went visiting the Brahma temple in Pushkar (the only Brahma temple in India), and stopped for some amazingly expensive chai. The festival was trying to attract tourists by offering a "Cultural program", considering of "beard growing contests" and "milking contests" and similar high-brow entertainment. I decided to leave the tour group for a while to go off and take some photos. Rajastan is famous for the brightly colored dresses and turbans worn by the locals, and I really enjoyed having some alone time photographing the camels and the colorful clothes. I also managed to buy some really high quality pashminas at a very reasonable price.
In the evening, we went to see another part of the cultural programme, a dance performance. It was a bizarre display with a guy looking exactly like Colonel Gadaffi in woman's makeup performing some weird interpretive dance, explaining about the life of Krishna. It was very strange, and it went on for about an hour, so we really had our fill of culture before heading back to the tent camp. Back at the camp, the tent camp owner was hosting a 1-year birthday party for his daughter. It was very unexpected and we found it very interesting that they chose to invite a tour group to this family event.
Saturday we left Pushkar and spent the whole day driving to Jodhpur (The Blue City), where we visited the impressive
Mehrangarh Fort. Situated on a hilltop, the fort really stands out in the landscape, and it is a really impressive structure. It has been used in numerous movies, mostly for the great views towards the blue-painted houses in certain districts of Jodhpur. I was really looking forward to seeing this for myself, but unfortunately we came at the wrong time of day, so I couldn't get any good photos because of the position of the sun. We had a quick stroll through the local market buying spices before having a shabby buffet dinner at the hotel. I was really pleased with finally staying in a hotel with hot water and working showers .
Sunday was spent on the road, driving way out West towards the Pakistani border to the desert town of Jaisalmer. It was a very long uneventful drive, just interrupted for stops for chai, and a stop to watch the desert sunset. We arrived quite late and had dinner al fresco on the roof of a restaurant with views of the illuminated fortress of Jaisalmer. We were entertained by trying to decipher the menu which included such gems as "Spegati Boneless". Soo... the spaghetti normally has bones in India? Later on we would find a roadside cafe that served
"Chicken Sweat & Sour"...
Monday we walked around the historic inner city of Jaisalmer, inside the fort. It was a nice stroll around the narrow traditional streets, except for the pungent aroma of open-air sewers. I remember being impressed with all the Krishna murals we saw. We also visited a Jain temple and looked at some...unorthodox... pictures of Krishna and Lakhsmi. We also visited some of the traditional trader's houses and looked at their impressive facades. The only annoying thing about the walk was the local guide dragging us into several shopping outlets.
In the afternoon we were driven out into the desert, where there were camels waiting for us. We rode camels for about an hour to get to our desert camp. I had never ridden camels before, and it was a pretty bumpy ride. Also, my camel handler had not padded the wooden saddle properly, so my bum was tenderized by the trip. By the end of second day of the camel trekking, I had bleeding saddle sores, so it was very painful to sit on the coach when we drove on bumpy roads.
Upon arriving at our desert camp, we walked to the top of the dunes to look at the sunset. We saw lots of lizard tracks in the dunes, and some members of the group asked the guide whether there were scorpions and snakes around the camp. He then proceeded to tell them his best fib of the trip: "The scorpions and snakes only like the high ground... they don't come down here where we have our tents."
We had dinner and sat outside on folding chairs, drinking beer, talking and looking at the stars until late.
Tuesday morning was to be our main camel trekking day. I struggled to put my contacts in without access to running water, so I think I spent 15 minutes getting them in. We rode off in our camels, spending the entire day riding, stopping only to water and feed the camels. We also stopped to look at a gypsy village. The gypsies lived in huts made from branches tied together, and they were swarming us begging for "Bon-Bon". Apparently French groups had a habit of handing out sweets and shampoo to the gypsies. We ended up at a more permanent desert camp, where they had some drumming and dancing entertainment in the evening. At this point we were very fed up with all the touristy dancing and drumming.
The next two days were spent mainly on road transport, first to Bikaner, and then after a short trip of the fort and Maharaja palace in Bikaner we went on to Nawalgarh, where we had a quick stroll through the center with the Shekhavati trader houses.
We spent our last night in Rajastan staying in the Maharaja Palace in Nawalgarh, having dinner and then drinking beers, talking and looking at the stars. It was a very nice evening, not impeded by the noises of angry cows and barking dogs around the palace.
Friday morning we went bicycling on some very rickety bikes on the back roads of Nawalgarh. We stopped to look at a fruit farm before getting back in the mini-bus for our drive back to Delhi. We stayed at the same hotel in Delhi as when we arrived, and had a quick dinner before turning in, as the people returning to Britain had very early flights.
My flight wasn't until Saturday evening, so I had one more day of sightseeing in Delhi. Unfortunately I contracted Delhi belly, so I had a really upset stomach, which was not very compatible with sightseeing. I still managed to see the Delhi Gate, the National Museum (not that great and there were lots of school kids there, really annoying) and the
Purana Quila. The Purana Quila looked very moody in the morning smog, so I'm glad I went to see it, although overall it was a bit underwhelming after seeing so many forts in Rajastan.
I noticed that the taxis ripped me off less on this day than on the day I arrived. I assumed I maybe had acquired more of a tan, so I no longer had that "fresh off the plane"-look, but it could also be that from dealing with the touts in Pushkar , I had gained some facial expressions that made them understand I was in no mood to be ripped off. I had no patience with these people, and they could sense that.
I went back to the really annoying Delhi airport to catch my flight, and they wouldn't let me through the departures doors so I could check in until a couple of hours before my flight departed. I was annoyed at this, because it meant I had to sit in a crappy paid "lounge" outside the airport, when I could have been in the KLM gold lounge inside the airport.
Before getting to my flight I had to go through the slowest and most inefficient security check I have ever encountered, involving having boarding passes stamped, luggage tags stamped and everyone checked manually before then being stopped by more guards checking that you had all your stamps. At the time I was very focused on getting home anyway, and annoyed at my travel agent for booking me through Paris instead of straight home.
Overall, I had a good trip. I saw lots of interesting things and it was very different from a lot of my previous travel experiences. Traveling in India is not for the squeamish, though. Toilet and sanitary arrangements were dreadful, and roadside restaurants were very basic. Also, hotel standards were poorer than anywhere else I've been in the world.
The main thing I took back from this trip, however, was meeting my girlfriend, Peta.
Pictures from
Delhi and AgraPictures from
Rajastan
