Went to see the tigers. The tigers went and hid.
Ranthambore was previously a royal hunting ground and home to tigers, leopards and marsh crocodiles. It’s now a nature reserve. Only 20% of the area is open for tourism and there are reported to be less than one hundred tigers in the area.
Presumably the previous hunting had something to do with that.
Anyway, here is what we were hoping to see:
Here is what we did see:
Ranthambore was the first area in India to set up a protected area for tigers. We’ve booked a couple of days here in the hope of seeing some in the wild.
After the disappointment of the step wells in Bundi, we were delighted to find a much better example when we arrived at the Jungle Villa hotel.
The journey up from Bundi to Ranthambore was uneventful so it set me thinking about some of the words we’ve imported from India into the English language. Here are a few:
We’d chosen to visit Bundi as we’d heard it had some amazing step wells. What a disappointment. The place is filthy, two of the three step wells are a disgrace and the third is not much to write home about.
As we got to the third step well, the rain started to come down. It felt like the heavens were crying with us.
It’s a tragedy really. Bundi could really make a go of itself by looking after it’s key tourist attractions but instead it simply doesn’t.
This time India, it’s not me, it’s you.
Although Bundi was a disappointment, the Halvelli where we stayed was a delight.
The grandfather of the current owner used to be the Prime Minister of Bundi state and attended the Grand Durbar in Delhi in 1903.
One of the pictures we saw on the wall was of the Princes of India at that time. We’re pretty certain it was the inspiration for the cover of the Beatles ‘Sergeant Pepper’s album.
And finally, after one night only ……
It’s our first and only full day in Pushkar. I still don’t like it but the camels are all right.
The road to our hotel was closed because of the camel fair when we arrived last night so we had to walk down a slightly dodgy back alley to get to it. It sits on the edge of a large lake and is romantically named the Sunset View Hotel and Restaurant.
There’s always a place for romance in an adventure and so we’d booked a superior deluxe room with a view of the lake. In reality it’s a cafe with a few rooms at the back and the rooms are only deluxe in the sense of ‘de luxe like dey was fibbin on Booking.Com’.
We went out exploring for a couple of hours and quickly came back with the impression of things being over-priced and of poor quality. It also all felt ‘off’ in some way we couldn’t figure out.
Public displays of religion were everywhere and it turns out that the lake is a major pilgrimage centre although we didn’t know that before we came here.
Hindus’s are meant to avoid materialism so the monks tend to have very little in the way of possessions. The most extreme form of this includes eschewing all forms of clothing and we saw one monk walking the streets who was completely naked apart from a sleeping sheet over his shoulder.
Pious, exhibitionist, emperor’s new clothes, care in the community gone wrong – take your pick of explanations.
Even taking the most generous explanation of the behaviour though, it strikes me that there is a strong element of geographical context to the act. Try walking around with your kit off in Whitley Bay in winter pet and I’m sure you’d soon be looking for a different interpretation of the scriptures.
We’d chosen to come to Pushka not for the lake but because there is an international camel festival on. Annette was feeling unwell and I couldn’t persuade her to go for a quick dip to get better so she stayed at the hotel and I went wandering on my own.
The further I got from the area of our hotel the more things began to feel like normal. Or at least, normal for India.
For example, when I stopped to take a photo of a chemist’s shop, the guy on the bike saw me taking the photo. We got chatting even though neither of us spoke the other’s language and I have his address to send him a copy of the photos.
The two guys running the chemist shop were equally friendly and now have pictures of me.
The Pushkar Camel Fair has been running for years and used to include camel racing. Sadly that got stopped because it was becoming too dangerous and the camels always won but the fair is still about buying and selling both camels and thoroughbred horses.
It’s also about making horses dance, making children bend in to strange positions and generally having a good time. It was exciting, colourful and great fun.
I’ve tried to reflect on why I didn’t like Pushkar and I’ve decided it’s not Pushkar’s fault. It’s mine.
The city is a major pilgrimage site and we were neither aware initially nor part of that. Worse, we were staying, albeit inadvertently, on the edge of one of the major ghats. Eating a meal and chatting at the side of that whilst people performed what to them was a holy ritual must have been like having someone having fish and chips at the back of church during a baptism.
Sorry it took me a while to cotton on, Pushkar.
I don’t like Pushka. I should do, but I don’t. Even with the camels.
We spent a fairly uneventful five hours or so driving up from Udaipur to Pushka and there were only two memorable things of note:
On first appearances Pushka looks like the ideal place to relax. It’s built around a beautiful lake and from our hotel you can see the sun setting in the distance.
But appearances can be deceiving. It’s an Indian version of Lourdes – with camels. The noise of being called to prayer, the chanting and the bloody bells is relentless.
Pushkar Lake is sacred to Hindus and described in Hindu scriptures as ‘the king of pilgrimage sites related to a water body’. When I looked up why, a ninth-century king once chased a white boar to the lake shore on a hunting expedition. Being thirsty, instead of popping in to one of the hotels for a beer, he dipped his hand into the lake and was astonished to see that the severe loss of pigmentation on his hand disappeared.
The King was so impressed with the sacred curative nature of the lake that he restored the area to its current glory. It now has 52 bathing ghats (stepped areas down to the lake) and the whole thing is a major pilgrimage site.
Men and women come here in their thousands to take a sacred bath in the waters. A dip in the lake is believed to cleanse sins and is meant to be particularly good for curing skin diseases.
I think this must be how homeopathic medicine works. After all, what could possibly be better for a skin disease than bathing in the same water that other people with skin diseases have used.
It’s like a giant Jacuzzi – but not as warm.
When is a Palace not a palace?
After the miracles of our Ayurvedic therapy sessions yesterday, we were up for some sightseeing.
We started at the Sajjangarh Palace about 5km from Udaipur on the peak of the Aravalli hills at 3,100 ft above sea level and the hills you see in the pictures below are the oldest fold mountains in the world.
The palace was intended to be a multi-storey observatory for watching the monsoon rains but work came to a halt when the 25 year old Maharana who commissioned it died in 1884. The work wasn’t wasted though as the palace featured as the residence of the evil villain, Kamal Khan, in Octopussy.
Never was the saying that history belongs to the victor more true than of the Royal Palace in Udaipur.
Back in the day, marriages of political expediency across royal families were as much a feature of Indian royal life as they were of European royalty. Due to a ‘bureacratic mix-up’, at one point the daughter of the Maharaja of Udaipur was offered for marriage to both the prince of Jaipur and the prince of Jodhpur at the same time.
Both princes arrived to claim their bride and both set up camp outside the Royal Palace. The Maharaja obviously couldn’t pick one prince over the other as that would cause offence. Clearly there was only one way out. The princess would have to die.
To be fair to him the Maharaja wasn’t a cruel man and he didn’t have it in him to kill his daughter. So instead he asked her to take her own life, assisted by the ladies of the palace. Twice she took poison and survived. The third time she took morphine with the poison and died.
History records that he was a wise and compassionate man and that his daughter happily sacrificed her own life for the good of the realm.
After the frenzy of Jodhpur, Udapur turned out to be something of an oasis.
Like most of these places there is an old town and a new town and we were in the old down by the lakeside. Last year the lake had been empty due to the lack of rain but this year it looked stunning.
The place was so relaxing, I got lulled into a sense of false confidence and decided to try an Ayurvedic massage.
Now I knew that Ayurvedic medicine is a whole body healing system but what I hadn’t realised was that they have been misspelling things. When it comes to massage, what they really mean is ‘hole’ body’.
I’ve had firm massages before but the guy I got had fingers that could, and did, crush bone. I had an hour of full-on massage that often led to big swear words that only served to encourage him. Relaxing it wasn’t.
And then we go to the facial.
I’d forgotten I’d signed up for the facial so it was a bit of a surprise when the psycho- therapist finished massaging my head and suddenly slopped a couple of fully loaded sponges in my face. Then he followed up with a big dollop of abrasive ointments that smelt nice but felt like a Black and Decker sander as he rubbed them all over my face.
He repeated the process for fifteen minutes. Part of me wanted to laugh. The sane part wanted to keep every orifice I had closed in case he decided to do an internal cleanse whilst he was at it.
While I was having my massage, the Ayurvedic Doctor offered to provide some free of charge treatment to Annette on her arthritic knee.. This involved a little old lady with fingers to rival my guy massaging special oils into her leg. Sadly it didn’t solve the problem and I’m sure she’ll be able to walk again by tomorrow.
We took up the offer of a tuk-tuk driver to show us some of the sights:
And I think this last one speaks for itself.
It dawned on me today that as a result of being driven everywhere I didn’t have a mental map about where we are and where we’ve been. I know we’re in India and so far we’ve travelled from Delhi to Jaipur to Jodhpur and now to Udaipur.
Anyway, with the help of good old Google, here’s what it looks like so far.
I must be becoming acclimatised to India. Everything we saw along the way is all starting to feel pretty normal now.
The highlight of the journey down was a visit to the Jain temple at Ranakpur. It’s one of the largest and most important temples in Jain culture and it turns out I’m a bit of a fan of their philosophy .
The essence of Jainism is concern for the welfare of every being in the universe and for the health of the universe itself.
They believe that animals and plants as well as people contain living souls and that each of these souls has equal value and should be treated with respect and compassion.
They then believe in reincarnation and seek to escape the continuous cycle of birth, death and rebirth by transcending karma so that the immortal soul lives forever in a state of bliss.
So there are no gods or spiritual beings that will help human beings. Just three guiding principles of:
These translate into the following key behaviours.
Given how delicious the mutton and other meat dishes are out here it’s likely to be a bit of a challenge in practice, but food for thought.
Oops. The previous top travel tip about not buying anything on your first day in a new place needs to be updated to include not buying anything on your last day either.
We started the morning by looking for the Jodhpur Step Well which was always around 100 yards in whichever direction we’d just come from. As we got hotter and sweatier we decided to bail out for a coffee and found an absolute gem of an hotel which took pity on us.
I wouldn’t change the accommodation we stayed in for the world. I think that if we’d stayed at the Raas Hotel we’d have missed out on the whole mad experience that makes Jodhpur what it is. But I confess, I was seriously tempted to bail out for our third night.
We asked the hotel if there was somewhere we could have a coffee and the staff welcomed us with open arms. Their courtesy was faultless and their service unsurpassed.
The waiter brought our drinks and asked where we we were staying . When we told him we were in a heritage hotel he disappeared off and brought us some beautiful chocolate pastries – on the house. And then he brought us some more. Clearly he thought we needed looking after.
Even though we weren’t staying there the hotel looked after us like we were part of the royal family. All hail the Raas Hotel.
I should perhaps mention that when I looked up the price of the hotel on line later, it was just over £300 for the night. So much for bailing out.
The drinks were much more affordable at around ten pounds. All hail.
It turned out that we were in the right area for the Step Well after all and that you can get to it through a private entrance from the Raas Hotel. Of course you can. One of the staff showed us the way and gave us a brief introduction before discreetly floating away.
Apparently the water comes up to the upper arches in the rainy season and nobody is clear about the source although we reckon the rain might have something to do with it.
After the Step Well we decided to go wandering around the streets of Jodhpur and after several recommendations from people who had no more idea of what we were looking to see then we did, we ended up at Jain Textiles. This is a Aladin’s cave of fabrics.
Who knew we needed a couple of Indian duvet covers and a wrap to remind us of our trip?
Who knew there was a place in the world where they have a person dedicated to wrapping up fabric for customers?
And who knew Dave would look so dapper in a Jodhpur from Jodhpur?
What are the odds? We knew our neighbour, Mo, was in India and we had planned to meet up with her and her friends later in our trip. What we hadn’t expected was to bump into each other in the middle of the chaos and cacophony that is the glory of Jodhpur.
Somehow in the middle of all this, and quite unplanned, we bumped into each other. So we did what you do and went out for curry and a beer.
It’s difficult to convey in words what Jodhpur is like. It was named after a local brand of trousers and is an absolutely glorious place. Noisy, bustling, friendly, full-on and wonderfully mad. I love it.
Our accommodation is based in the old heart of the city and because the roads are so narrow, cars are not permitted in the area.
I’d taken that to mean that the area is pedestrianised but not a bit of it. There are miles of narrow streets, shop after shop of everything you could want, and people, scooters, animals and tuk-tuks all over the place.
Tuk-tuks make perfect sense in a place like this. Nippy, manoeuvrable and cheap. Most rides cost no more than IR 100 (about a £1.00) provided you are prepared to walk away when the drivers try to push for more. It’s all good humoured though and the rides are thrilling or terrifying depending on your point of view.
WordPress won’t let me add the videos I’ve done at the moment so you’ll just have to imagine things for now.
Annette’s top travel tip for tuk-tuk rides might help. If you’re going to ride in a tuk-tuk, make sure you’re wearing a good sports bra. And she’s not just talking about the women.
The main tourist attraction in Jodhpur is the fort. This is a hugely impressive structure which dominates the town and we’d booked a room in a ‘heritage’ accommodation hotel that promised us a balcony view of it.
The hotel is great but it turns out that ‘heritage accommodation’ means quirky accommodation with steep flights of stairs for people with young, fit legs.
The proprietor took one look at us as we checked in and offered us the choice of the top floor room we’d booked or another one on the first floor. We went up, we came down. The lower room we can get to is fine.
Mehrangarh Fort is amazing. It’s one of the largest forts in India, worth going out of your way for and blows the places we’ve seen in in Delhi and Jaipur out of the water.
It was built in 1459 and has been attacked many times but has never been breached.
We took an audio tour and heard tails of the daring do of the Maharaja and the ladies who listened to poetry and danced ‘til dawn. Sometimes dancing even seemed to mean dancing.
We also heard about the Maharaja’s wives who joined their husbands on their funeral pyres, apparently silently joining them in eternal bliss. Yeah right!
On to the sights.
If you’ve got to die, do it in style. Here’s where the royals were cremated and interred.
And here is where they still live. If you’ve got a few bob, you can stay in the part of the palace set aside as an hotel but you’ll miss out on the glory of the city.
Dave and Annette in India and Nepal