Posts tagged ‘india’

My travels are over and I’m back in a country where despite the many apocalyptic events happening throughout the world, a fast horse apparently deserves the first ten minutes of every news bulletin.

The remainder of my time in India went well. As promised, I rode off in to the desert on a camel and returned 24 hours later with a very sore arse. I visited a few more forts and palaces and now know far more than I ever needed to about Rajasthani history. I went to a number of very different cities — Jodhpur which was a nice place whose major claim to fame is that most of the buildings are painted blue, Udaipur which is a beautiful town on the edge of a lake and a good place to relax before I headed on to Ahmedabad, the most polluted city I have ever been to where my eyes were burning after 10 seconds outside and finally Mumbai.

Mumbai was a good place to finish. While still being very clearly Indian, it is India’s most westernised city with alcohol being far more accepted, people more often wearing western clothes and women actually speaking and being spoken to. It also bans rickshaws from most of the city meaning all the would-be rickshaw touts seem to have become drug dealers instead.

The absolute highlight of my time in India was the food which was amazing, particularly for a vegie like me. The restaurants class themselves as either ‘pure veg’, ‘veg’ or ‘non-veg’ and even non-veg tended to have loads of vegie food. It all tasted great, full of flavour and very fresh with my favourite dish being masala dosa — a pancake filled with spicy mashed potato. After such spicy, flavoursome food everything back here is tasting a bit bland.

But its not all bad. It’s great to look at the sky and see blue rather than haze. Driving down a three lane road with only three lanes of traffic moving down it is certainly novel and the sound of silence (rather than car horns) has never sounded so good. Anyway, must go — a newsflash on the highlights of Makybe Diva’s first day of retirement has just appeared on Ninemsn.

This India place is pretty hectic. Appartently they have over a billion people here, and I think about half of them have asked me if I want to ride in their rickshaw. After about a week here I am slowly getting in to the Indian swing of things. My first few days were pretty bewildering — Delhi isn’t the easiest place in the world to find yourself in after the relative familarity of London. And after Delhi, Agra was equally challenging. The Taj Mahal is just as astonishing as everyone says it is but inevitably the more tourists there are, the more touts there are and the more aggresively they go about their touting. There I had one rickshaw driver following me around for two hours insisting I wanted to ride in his rickshaw. After that Jaipur has been pleasantly calm. It is still a big city — 2.5 million people (and a proper 2.5 mil city not a ‘somewhere between Melbourne and Adelaide 2.5 mil’) — with eight lanes of traffic trying to squeeze down a two lane road.

My more enjoyable time in Jaipur is in a large part due to Satendra, my new Indian friend and rickshaw driver who will actually take me where I want to go rather than where he will get the most commission. Yesterday he drove me round all the sites of Jaipur — most impressively the Amber Fort — about my fifth Indian Fort but by far the most impressive, nestled away on a hillside with hundreds of rooms to explore, many of which seemed like they hadn’t been found in a century or two, the Monkey valley where I made the serious faux-pas of hitting the bell in the Hindu temple with my head (they don’t plan for people over 5’10” here) which apparently meant the Hindu gods would curse me, and with 30 million of them that can’t be good, and some astronomical observatory built by one of the kings in which he felt the need to include a seven storey high sundial.

Anyway a couple of hours it is on to Jaisalmer, a desert city from where you can go even more deserty by heading on a camel safari out in to the middle of nowhere. If I survive expect another update from India in a week or so…