India, the story so far
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…
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Tom
October 16th, 2005 at 6:50 pm
When you get back, you better have come up with a way to ensure those around you aren’t caught up as collateral damage when your divine retribution kicks in. Some sort of religious lightning rod should do the trick.
How did you manage to find Satendra? Was he the lucky 1,000th rickshaw driver who asked you?
Andy
October 16th, 2005 at 9:20 pm
Being a lazy shifty good-for-nothing, I’m thinking about quiting my job. Do you think rick-shaw driving is for me?
Ahh, the deep unforgiving desert. Wide boundless dunes of rock and sand, your meanderings only impeded by low brick walls. Watch out for the death beetles, undead scavengers and sand worms.
Tom
October 16th, 2005 at 9:27 pm
Finding shelter inside a handy ancient tomb might be your best option if things get too hot. Just make sure it’s not the resting place of an entombed evil magi or the home of a tribe of giant snakes.
Or, both.
Andrew
October 17th, 2005 at 7:40 am
Turns out there are 300 million of the buggers (gods not rickshaw drivers, although it would probably be close) so an order of magnitude worse than I suggested. Andy, I think that would be a marvelous idea — you would have a complete monopoly of the Melbourne rickshaw market.