Jodhpur from Meherengarh

After a long love affair with India’s red-est red tape laden bureaucracy, Indian Railways, we managed to cancel all our train tickets and actually got all the money back, even for the train to Jodphur which, by the time I finished running around collecting all the requisite stamps and signatures and stamped signatures and signed stamps, we had already missed anyway.  We had decided to drive through Rajasthan because, much like Maine, you can’t get there from here.

The main attraction in Jodhpur is Meherengarh Fort.  The imposing  walls loom over everything in old Jodhpur and the fort is the best preserved and well cared for piece of heritage property I’ve seen in India.  The highlight of the audio tour is a lengthy exposition on opium in Indian culture.

Sadar bazaar

Below the fort, and just outside our hotel, is Sadar Bazaar, a European style square market centered on an old British Raj age clock tower.  It was in Sadar Bazaar that we went looking for tea and spices and ended up at a little shop where some of the cast of Darjeeling Limited had stopped while shooting.  The guys working there showed us a photo of themselves with Jason Schwartzman.  According to one of the shopkeepers the crew spent two days filming him cooking pakoras in the shop, footage that I guess didn’t make the final cut.

spice market

So, ok, full disclosure: I only bought tea at the same shop as Jason Schwartzman, we’re not best friends – though I’m sure we’d get along great if we ever met – but I have to resort to these kinds of tactics to keep you people reading!

A fun side note: Both in Pushkar and in Jodhpur we stayed in havelis which are mansions converted into  guest houses.  They have much more character and are a lot cheaper than hotels and the haveli in Jodhpur had the best rooftop restaurant I’ve seen yet.

From Jodhpur we set out for Udaipur, on the way we stopping in Ranakpur, a town which houses an incredible Jain temple, some small guest houses, and not much else.

Jain temple in Ranakpur

The temple at Ranakpur is a huge tangle of marble columns, 1444 in all and each one different from the rest.  There are also ornate domes, a thousand-year-old tree that grows within the temple, secret chambers, and deities with creepy glowing eyes.  In terms of detail I think it gives the Western temple group at Khajuraho a run for its money.

temple detail

The outskirts of Udaipur are very modern.  Brand new glass-dominated facades; wide, organized roads; and a surprising cleanliness eventually give way to the well-worn, snaking avenues of the old city.  But, thankfully, the cleanliness is consistent.  There is a quiet European feel to the narrow streets and colonial buildings that hem them, but maybe that’s just because of all the Europeans hanging around there.

on the road to Udaipur

Udaipur is particularly famous for the Lake Palace, a former Maharana residence turned super-luxury hotel which seems to float in Lake Pichola and at which part of the James Bond movie Octopussy was filmed.  There are all kinds of restaurants in the area which have nightly showings of the flick, and a few shops have also usurped the title.

Lake Palace Hotel

I’m trying to think of comical or ironic things that happened in Udaipur, but nothing is really springing to mind.  Our driver between Jodhpur and Udaipur told us the four points of driving in India, which are worth sharing.  They are, 1. A good horn. 2. Good breaks 3. A good driver, and 4. Good luck.  They’re really only funny under certain circumstances, which are: you’re in India and the four points are being relayed by an Indian driver who’s having to swerve through swarming, honking Indian traffic.  It’s a kind of nervous humor…  An auto rickshaw driver told us what India stands for – I’ll Never Do It Again.  More low-level humor; I’m really stretching here.  Hmm, have you heard the one about the Michael Jackson and the Hindu priest on an airplane full of school children?  You have!

Udaipur

Well, maybe that’s all that’s worth saying right now.  I’m at the end of my trip and the end of my wits and I’ll try to make a little more sense of things at a later date.  Until then – and assuming you’re even interested – at least you have some photos to enjoy.  As I’ve said before, I have a whole bunch of film I’ll be developing when I get home, a few rolls of color that I’ll have scanned and will post pretty quick and a lot of b&w that I’ll print when I can afford to rent darkroom space, or else get a chance to set up my own darkroom gear again.

Back in Delhi now, murdering time until I return to a land where the steering wheels are where I expect them, where masala is conspicuously absent, and where I’ll have to begrudgingly return to normal hygiene standards – that, by the way, is not a reflection on Indian standards of hygiene so much as a reflection on what the heat has done to me.  And the heat hasn’t abated.  It’s still in the upper 90s and muggy in spite of the month.  This whole late monsoon business is really a rather unfortunate piece of luck, but in a week it’s back to sunny and 70.

dye for sale, Pushkar

In order that you might better appreciate the second installment of my adventures with the monkey god, BFF of Ram and Sita, and inspiration for the mantra, “no toilet, no shower, Hanuman power for 24 hour,” I should probably bestow on you the first installment, as that’s  usually how these things work – sequential order and all that.  I would have written about it earlier, of course, but I was tied up in a legal battle with Warner Bros. who wanted to option the story and wouldn’t let me publish it separately, but they eventually relented when they realized it wasn’t much of a story anyway.

Toward the end of my little jaunt through the Jaipur, the Pink City, I was brought high up onto a wooded hill full of exotic things, like peacocks and little shrines and the trash people threw out their windows as they’d driven to past.  In the crotch of a pair of steep mountain peaks was a weathered and ancient looking compound and a path up into the pass.  This was the monkey temple, I was told, and I’d better watch out or the monkeys – which were everywhere – would steel my stuff.

Inside the compound it was deadly quiet.  I say deadly quiet because I just assumed the place was full of snakes or killer gorillas like in the movies and I was only a few breathes away from my comeuppance.  Spoiler alert: I didn’t get my comeuppance after all.  I poked around cautiously, taking a few pictures here and there, until a rail thin old man in a white cloth and bushy, greasy hair and beard appeared at the top of some stone stairs and beckoned me up and into the door.  I could have run for it, but there were the snakes and killer gorillas to think about, so I followed.  The old man led me deep into the building through winding sets of hallways which opened onto marble terraces and then into a small room full of flower garlands and incense and pictures of gods.  He sat cross-legged.  He indicated that I do the same.  I thought, this is it, I’m going to achieve enlightenment.  I hope it doesn’t take too long, I’m getting hungry.

The old man picked up a peacock feather.  “This is the peacock feather,” he said.  He pointed with the peacock feather.  “The is the Shiva…  This is the Laxman…  This is the Ram and Sita…  This is the monkey god Hanuman…  What is your name?”  I told him and he touched the peacock feather to my head then to one of the pictures of the gods then slid a metal dish toward me.  “This is the Hanuman Temple donation.”

300 rupees later and higher up the hill I had seen a rock formation that looked to me like an amoeba, but which I was told was an appearance of Hanuman, had some string tied to my wrist, and been sung to.  No enlightenment to speak of.

Pushkar, seen from the Pink Floyd cafe

That was about a month ago, and now that I’m plus one human shield travel partner, I decided to peak into another Hanuman temple.  This one, in Pushkar, was a white tower with colorful statues of some Hindu gods carved on the sides.  Inside the temple, Meena – Meena being my aforementioned travel partner – and I were greeted by an old sadhu in orange who walked us around a Hanuman deity once or twice in some ceremony we couldn’t quite discern as he didn’t speak a lick of English, then after much fiddling and grinning he unlocked the gate to the tower: we were about to get the V.I.P. tour.

ghat entrance, Pushkar

Each floor had it’s own case with a statue of a deity, or pair of deities in one or two instances.  We were whisked at an ever increasing rate up the flights of stairs until we reached the top where a huge, orange five-headed, ten-armed deity took center stage.  After a kind of fit of Hindi we realized we were supposed to make an monetary offering at the feet of the deity, which the sadhu promptly pocketed, and then after some more abortive explanations – well, really he could have been saying anything! – he produced two handfuls of coconut chunks which he dispensed to each of us and instructed us to eat.  When it was clear we weren’t getting down from there without eating the coconut chunks I stuck one in my mouth and made a half-hearted effort to chew.  I do believe the thing was so old that it had become petrified, all the coconut replaced by some mineral or another.  Downstairs I spit the leaden coconut out and threw the rest on the side of the road.  Curious… I’ve had a fever since then.

Pushkar

The first night we spent in Pushkar was punctuated by an event we dubbed the ‘maniacal laugh-off.’  I’m not entirely sure how to do the thing justice, but in purely empirical terms what was literally happening was that a man was broadcasting his voice over a thundering PA system from a temple on top of a mountain outside Pushkar yelling – well, we had no idea what he was yelling.  Then a second man joined in, broadcasting from a different location.  There seemed to be some sort of give-and-take routine going on, then the men suddenly broke into laughter, maniacal laughter, I’m talking Dr. Claw maniacal laughter, no, Vincent Price maniacal laughter!

Pushkar kids

Why was this happening?  You don’t ask questions like that here, you just enjoy the show.

About the tailoring incident I’m disinclined to say much, just because it hasn’t been the only event of its kind in the last couple weeks.  It was the usual hack job: ride on the back of the tailor’s motorcycle to the material shop, pick from various sherbet plaids, fight with the tailor over the crappy job he’s doing, fight with the tailor over the fact that he can’t finish on time, fight with the tailor because in the end you don’t want anything he made because the shirts might fit Andre the Giant but they won’t fit you.

heading to the tailor's

Also, at some point in time I can’t place anymore, I was attacked by women who drew crappy henna on my hand and then tried to ask for 300 rupees.

In any case, we departed Pushkar in a rush, having concluded the tailor fiasco in the waning minutes of our visit, and thus began our transportation fiasco at the Ajmer train station.  But that’s a story for another time.

cable-car to "uptown" Mussoorie

I don’t know if this is a strictly Himalayan thing, but an unfortunate element of my two weeks in the hill has been the omnipresence of Celine Dion.  I escaped Rishikesh and the otherwise friendly guys at the Oasis Café who’d been tormenting me with that music, only to find that the prevailing café music in Mussoorie is much in the same vein, with the additional annoyance of Britney Spears.  In fact, as I began writing this in a Mussoorie restaurant I was listening to Dion belt out “have you ever been so in looooooooooooooove!”

Mussoorie, Queen of the Hill, perched at between 2000 and 2500 meters – depending on which part of town you’re in – is a favorite spot for Indian honeymooners and is, I’m sorry to say, a very boring place.

There are some great views – of the Doon Valley to the south and into the lower Himalaya to the north – but views can’t hold your attention for long if you’ve got nothing to do.  There is a Tibetan market, made up of pop-up tables and tarp shades, and there are various stores with Himalayan handicrafts, textiles, and garments.  It’s a good place to get a sweater, I guess.

The highlights: a dozen or so little sidewalk bakeries full of delicious sweets and delivering diabetes to many a sweet-toothed vacationer; a scenic road around the backside of the peak; Sherpas all over the place, sporting traditional Himalayan dress and carrying 10 times their body weight in the most random paraphernalia; the view, as mentioned; and a zombie dog!

Tibetan Market, full of cheap things you never knew you didn't want

I first saw the thing walking from the bus station on my first day – I say bus station, but what I mean is the area where the driver seemed to arbitrarily stop near an open air urinal.  Stray dogs abound in India, but there seems to be an unusually high concentration in Mussoorie.  Most of them run around in packs, digging in trash bins or sleeping on the side of the road.  But there is one that roams around alone, it’s head cocked down and moving slowly, almost drunkenly.  When it got close I could see why, the damn thing had half its brain hanging out of the side of its head!  And I’ve seen it every day since, the walking dead, menacing the streets of Mussoorie, ruining appetites wherever it roams.  I thought about taking a picture to corroborate my zombie-dog claim, but the mangled pup was just too damn gross.

Mussoorie

And as for those honeymooners?  Well, given the rather business-like approach to marriage in India, I suppose the mountain views are a good way to inspire, er, whatever it is you do on a honeymoon in India (walk around holding hands?).  Actually, a great source of entertainment are the ‘matrimonials’ in the newspapers here; parents post ads for there marriage-ripe sons and daughters.  Here’s a beauty from Sunday’s ‘grooms wanted’ section:

South Delhi based very affluent, sophisticated, educated Gursihk family of high repute into business seeks match for their very smart only daughter25/5’04”/convent Educated/Bachelor Degree in Economics from OXFORD/MSC-LONDON/CFA working in U.K.  We are looking for a cosmopolitan very well qualified and well settled professional Gursikh boy preferably from India or abroad.

I figure I’ll throw my resume out there, see if I can get a few chaperoned date/interviews while I’m in country.

wanted: beautiful, talented, wealthy, educated woman for unemployed, unqualified, prospectless, irresponsible bum.

One thing Mussoorie definitely has working in its favor is a blend of rural and urban.  It manifests itself as a kind of hokey resort-ish vibe, but what the hell, embrace the hokey once in a while.  I spent my first evening drinking ginger tea at a ramshackle little cafe on a ledge hanging out over the mountains.  Next morning I was drinking Lavazza espresso in an Italian (style) cafe.

Mussoorie caffeine

Now I’m back in bustling Delhi, sitting in Open Hand Cafe poaching the intertubes and murdering flies.  Last night it took all of fifteen minutes of hotel room hawkers accosting me between the train station and the hotel I was heading to for me to flip out at one guy.  It takes a lot to get me screaming “fuck off!” at strangers, so you can imagine the guy probably deserved it.

Statue of Shiva on the Ganges, Ram Jhula

“Rishikesh isn’t really India.”

So says the (very attractive) Italian yoga instructor who resides in the adjacent room.  She’s been in India for a month, but hasn’t actually been outside of Rishikesh, so I’m inclined to think I know more than she does.

Actually, Rishikesh isn’t really Rishikesh.  When people refer to Rishikesh, they aren’t really talking about the town of Rishikesh which is noisy, crowded, and uninteresting.  What Rishikesh means to most people is a set of enclaves a few kilometers north which take their names from the jhulas, or suspension bridges, they’ve grown up around.  These enclaves are Ram Jhula and Laxman Jhula (where I’m staying).  Both are split into east and west sides by the Ganges.

view of the east bank of Laxman Jhula from my guest house

I came to Rishikesh after a brief stay in Haridwar, which is the point at which the Ganges exits the Himalaya and is reportedly comparable to Varanasi in terms of holiness and all that, and a whole lot cleaner.  Haridwar means something like “gateway to heaven” in Hindi.  I’m thinking I didn’t miss much in skipping Varanasi because I caught a ride out of Haridwar after barely 24 hours.  Rishikesh was meant to be one stop on a tour through this region of the Himalaya.  But, though I still have lots of time, I haven’t left yet.  So far, I have to say this is my favorite part of India.

Har-ki-Pairi Ghat, Haridwar

In a sense, though, the hot yoga instructor is right.  Rishikesh was made famous after the Beatles stayed here in 1968 and wrote a whole bunch of songs that eventually became a double LP.  Maybe you’ve heard of it, it’s a little ditty called The White Album.  Rishikesh is also apparently the global capital of yoga.  As a result of the post-Beatles influx of hippies, people who wanted to be hippies, and, more recently, people who really like Paolo Coelho novels, and the coincidental influx of whatever-people-who-are-into-yoga-are-called, it’s pretty safe to assume that any white person you see in Rishikesh is here to either A. stay in an ashram, or B. do yoga.  Or both, I guess.

somewhere around Swarg Ashram, Ram Jhula

I’m not here for either, but by dint of my whiteness I manage to avoid the question, “What are you doing here?” which I‘m asked everywhere else in this country and which, more often than not, comes across as an accusation.  Of course, I still stick out.  As one local put it, “You’re probably the tallest guy in all of Rishikesh.”

east bank of Laxman Jhula

Still, I’ve managed to keep my head low and remain innocuous, a small diamond smuggling incident notwithstanding (more on this later) and I’ve found that, on the whole, Rishikesh agrees with me, and I with it.

That’s probably because there’s nothing to do here but hang out in any of the dozens of cool cafes, or on the river Ganges, or on the big terrace of my guest house, maybe poke around in the shops full of Nepalese goods – the only shops in India where the shopkeepers don’t chase you around trying to coerce you into buying things you don’t want.

The name café, which is attached to every little watering hole for miles, is deceiving.  Though each and every one of them has coffee on the menu – sometimes “filter coffee” and rarely things like espresso and cappuccino – you’ll always get either instant coffee or instant coffee with milk.  If you want coffee there’s only one game in town, which is a place called Little Italy, tucked behind a huge chunk of Swarg Ashram in Ram Jhula, where they managed to conjure up a stove-top espresso maker.  (Did I ever write anything about Open Hand Cafe in Delhi?  India’s saving grace!)

one of Rishikesh's many cafes

What you can do in the cafés is gorge yourself on yak cheese and tomato sandwiches and world music.  My favorite spot thus far is the Little Buddha Café, all bamboo and big leathery foliage where I wandered in my first afternoon having heard the Beatles from the street.  Which reminds me, there are also a bunch of music shops where you can buy recordings of foreigners singing Hindu chants to accompaniment that would make even Enya cringe.

It’s a cheap, easy, bohemian existence, and if you can put up with the bitchy Israeli tourists who flock to Manali, Dharamsala, and Rishikesh all with the singular purpose of getting high – local characterization, not mine, though I do agree – and the occasional beggar cum sadhu – a sadhu is a Hindu holy man, and there are plenty of impostors in Rishikesh – then you will be as happy as clam.

somewhere in Ram Jhula

Oh, there’s one catch though, or two.  No meat.  No booze.  I know what you’re thinking, drag city.  Actually, it’s not so bad.  The food is really pretty good, and at this point in my India travels I’ve been avoiding meat long enough that I don’t really notice that it’s not on the menu.  The alcohol thing is a bummer, but if that really gets you down there’s no shortage of Manali hash around, just ask any Israeli tourist where to find it.

at the Aarti, Ram Jhula

I’ll get to that diamond smuggling thing in a minute, but first a little back story:  I was heading down to Ram Jhula on my second day in town.  I hadn’t made it too far when I ended up talking to a couple of local guys.  I had tea with one of them, a young guy from Nepal named Anil, and then he showed me around Ram Jhula that afternoon.  In the evening he brought me back down to Ram Jhula to see an Aarti.  An Aarti, as far as I could tell, consists of a bunch of people sitting around a fire pit on the edge of the Ganges with musical accompaniment, hand clapping, and some catch-as-catch-can ceremonial candle holding and sadhu head slapping.  A few woman got over excited and started dancing toward the end.  All in all a good show, after which we retired to the café where Anil works for some dinner.

at the Aarti, Ram Jhula

That’s when things got a little weird.  Anil is a good guy, and I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt, but there was this other character, another guy who worked at the café, or maybe just hung around there all the time, who sat with us for a while.  He was kind of lizard-like in appearance and full of irritating advice about my dinner, and always asking how I was doing (a sure sign in India that he’s after something).  Just as an aside, the word ‘friend’ is abused so badly in this country that I don’t think I’ll be able to use it any more.  “You should get some more chapati to finish that dal, friend.”  And then the bomb fell.

I’d made the mistake of dropping my alter ego with these guys, admitting I was from California instead of Edmonton, Canada.  It just so happened that Gecko McGreaseball was in need of the kind of help only an American could offer.  He needed to get a few diamonds and sapphires into the U.S., mumbled something about taxes, followed by the word ‘courier.’  I managed to render a non-committal response and got out on the pretense that I’d get locked out of my guest house – it was already midnight (this actually turned out to be true and it was by sheer luck that I didn’t have to spend the night out of doors).

I spent the next day avoiding the route by the café/guest house where I knew that crowd would be hanging out, but, feeling bad about avoiding Anil I passed by in the late afternoon and the diamond smuggler wasn’t around.  Anil and I decided we should go looking for the waterfalls the next day, which are supposed to be pretty nice, and we agreed to meet up in the morning, which we did, got lost, then took the bus to Shivpuri, which was not anywhere near the waterfalls, but at least we got in a swim in a nice glacial river with big green mountains as the backdrop.  It was all very Sound of Music.

Anil

Kama Sutra carvings on the facade of a Khajuraho temple

85 incredibly ornate temples were built in Khajuraho, a location of no great importance at the time of their construction, and they were built in only 100 years – between approx. 950 AD and 1050 AD.  The temples were abandoned as a result of tribal invasions and the area was reclaimed by the jungle until it was rediscovered by the British in the late 1800s.

Not all of the temples have survived, but today the Western temple group is a World Heritage Site (those seem to be very common in India).  The other two temple groups, East and South, are protected areas, their upkeep overseen by the Madhya Pradesh government.

The temples are perhaps most famous for their depictions of Kama Sutra scenes, and these were what we set out after last Thursday.

The Plan

Well, there wasn’t really a plan.  Kaitlin and I decided on Wednesday that we should go to Khajuraho via Gwalior and we should leave on Thursday.  We somehow managed to work all the details out, including train tickets for some of Kaitlin’s friends – who would meet up with us later on – and on Thursday we were off.

Gwalior

We spent a dismal, sleepless night at the Safari Hotel near the Gwalior train station, unable to stave off the mosquitoes and the noise from the street below.  So the next day we moved to a different place as soon as we got up and spent most of the morning and early afternoon catching up on the sleep we’d missed.

But in the late afternoon we headed out to see Gwalior fort, the city’s eponymous centerpiece.  The fort sits high above the city and covers much more ground than we could trek in a single afternoon.  But we did manage to tour Man Singh Palace, with it’s labyrinthine basements and painted facades – definitely the highlight of the fort.

Man Signh Palace, Gwalior

We stayed up at the fort until dark.  Sitting outside the entrance to the fort the noise of Gwalior rose up 1000 feet to us, both in a mixed urban din and in bizarre individual sounds: a baby crying, auto-rickshaw drivers shouting at each other.

Gwalior, seen from Gwalior Fort gate

Other than the fort, there’s not a lot to do in Gwalior – the possible exception being the novelty of the Indian Coffee House where, despite the lack of tourists in the area, the waiters wear white coats with big red belts and hats with paper fans in the style of the military parade uniforms (or at least what I assumed were military parade uniforms when we were on Waga Border in Attari).

Jhansi

In the morning Kaitlin and I boarded a train for Jhansi, only an hour ride; the same train that her classmates were on, coming from Delhi.  We all met up on the platform in Jhansi, plus a french woman who lived in Tel Aviv and her daughter.  Now there were 8; a large number for someone who had planned on doing a lot of solitary traveling.

In Jhansi, a city almost as ugly and obnoxious as Agra, we were swarmed by taxi and auto rickshaw drivers before we even got off the platform.  Eventually, we managed to commandeer two AC taxis for a reasonable price (3200 rupees, or about $60, for both cars for  a 4 hour ride.  You can’t do that in the US) and we were on our way to Khajuraho.

On the way to Khajuraho

On the way to Khajuraho

Khajuraho

We arrived to the small, somewhat backwater town of Khajuraho in the late afternoon and it didn’t take us long to find cheap accommodations on the main street.  We got two room for 6 people (finally, I was happy I had carted my damn sleeping pad around!), dropped our stuff, and headed out to the Eastern Temples, a 15 minute walk from the hotel.

Khajuraho kids

Cute kids, right?  They followed us around saying, “Money, money, gimme rupees,” and trying to tug us into their school – this is the traditional Khajuraho scam to disposes unwitting tourists of their rupees, but luckily we’d been briefed on it before hand.

Once they realized they weren’t getting any money from us, the kids followed us around some of the temples for a while and assumed the quiet content seen at left, occasionally posing for picture (one kid kept flexing his muscles), laughing, and running around in the brief rain that drove us under the awning of a shop, whose keeper tried as best he could to entice us in, just to get out of the rain of course.

I might be coming off as generally suspicious of the people here.  I can only say in my defense that, though I regret it, that suspicion is mostly earned.

Anyway, we wandered around the temples until dark, looking for, but not finding, the erotic carvings that Khajuraho is famous for.  The carvings and reliefs on these temples seemed primarily composed of somewhat prepubescent visions of female anatomy – by which I mean gravity defying, watermelon sized breasts.  None the less, the craftsmanship of these temples was impressive, and the quiet, rural setting they inhabited was a welcome change of pace.

One of the Eastern temples, Khajuraho

The next morning we were out of the hotel before 7 am.  The Western Temple group, which is larger and denser than its contrapositive, and in which we found those elusive carvings, contained 4 principal temples, and a handful of lesser ones.  We were the only people on the grounds that early, and we ambled around the interiors and exteriors with increasing lethargy as the temperature gradually rose.  That’s not a complaint or a criticism, in fact it was great.  The interiors of most of the temples were much cooler than the outside temperature, and the slow pace of our exploration served the two-fold purpose of keeping us (relatively) cool and allowing us to observe more closely than we might have otherwise.

In the Western Temple group, a World Heritage site

Small children and evangelicals, avert your eyes:

Inside the Laxmana temple, Western Temple group

Western Temple group

After a quick trip to one of the Southern temples, we headed back to the Harmony Hotel to sort out the rest of our day.  At that point it was only 10:30 or 11:00am, but we had a four hour ride back to Jhansi and a 6 o’clock train to Delhi.

I left the hotel in search of a copy of the Hindustan Times in English, which proved to be more work than I was counting on.  I ended up half a kilometer down the road with a group of boys in front of a bicycle rental shop.  One of the boys, who ran the shop, ran off with a 10 rupee note (the paper costs 5 rupees) and came back with a copy of the Times of India from the previous day.  C’est la vie, at least, it is in India.

The boys name was Tony and he followed my back to the hotel, speaking occasionally in rhymes: “No woman, no cry; no ganja no fly…”  He was the local dealer with all the top notch stuff from Manali and he couldn’t have been any older than 15 – maybe a young looking 16.  I was tempted to tell him I was from California, and had he ever heard of Humboldt County, but I’d already used my Canadian alter ego (I’ve been telling people that I’m from Edmonton, because when I’ve admitted I live in California I get the “oh, you’re a very rich man,” line, even when I protest that I’m unemployed).

Amidst the hub-bub of securing a ride back to Jhansi, with a detour through Orchha, I managed to shake Tony off, take a quick shower, and pack up just in time to get back on the road.

Orchha

Jahangir Mahal and, behind it, Raj Mahal

We spent a grand total of 2 hours in what might be my favorite Indian city so far.  Orchha sits on top of two small hills, which were probably one hill that was gradually cut in half by a river.  It’s a small cluster of little restaurants, store, and cafes huddled around a massive complex of 17th century palaces.  In that sense it’s almost European, an observation more than one of us made driving into town.

The people and atmosphere of this little town were startlingly different from Jhansi, only 18 kilometers away.  It’s a quiet (that is something I always take note of in India, which is a very noisy country) and relaxed place, with friendly, unassuming people.

After our all too brief tour of the two palaces, we drove back to Jhansi and caught our train back to Delhi.

Unfortunately, I’ve haven’t escaped Delhi since that short trip.  I spent this week setting up a trip through the western desert state of Rajasthan for the end of September, and deciding what to with for the first half of the month. While I’d originally planned on making the long journey to Darjiling, I ended up booking a ticket to Haridwar, at the foot of the western Himalaya, for tomorrow morning.  From there I’ll spend some time in Rishikesh (where the Beatles wrote most of the White Album) and Dehra Dun, and maybe I’ll head even farther north to Dharmasala or Manali, if I’m feeling up to the 10+ hour bus ride.

Stay tuned for more, and, as always, more photos on flickr.

Anyway, as I was saying the snap thing is erring on the obsessive side and I’ve decided to retaliate by ‘snapping’ back.  Here are a few of the results from Gwalior Fort today:

More to come, you can be sure…

One morning I was reading on the terrace and a man came up to me and asked if he could join me. He was a tour guide in Jaipur that the hotel manager had introduced me to – not without reason, as I had indicated I might return September. He asked what I was reading and seemed somewhat surprised, or maybe amused, that it was a novel. He had never finished a novel in his entire life. Indians, he explained, are for the practical approach to things.

Days later, back in Delhi, I began to notice something: There aren’t many bookshops, and of the bookshops you find, most sell text books, test prep books, and ‘competition’ books exclusively. There are a few that do sell ‘literature,’ mostly in the wealthier parts of the city, and though they are hard to find they are generally worth it, as much for the seemingly random assortment of books as for the shop personalities. I was in one the other day in the south of Delhi that seemed to be quite the hangout for literary-minded Indians: there was a woman who wrote for a Hong Kong magazine and a man who’d just published a book of some kind, though I never found out what exactly… maybe a test prep book?

Most books are comparatively cheap here and novels are routinely pedaled in the street – though I should qualify this by saying these ’novels’ are mostly popular paperback fictions – in the same manner as roses, candy, toys, and other ‘impractical’ items. In Pahar Ganj, also known as the main bazaar, there is a book exchange in which foreign tourists buy and sell books regularly so that there are books in several languages packed into a very small open air shop. It’s not far from where I’m currently staying and last night I almost bought a copy of George Sand’s Indiana in French, but decided I’d better finish off what I’ve already got (which is Aravind Agida’s two novels, The White Tiger and Between the Assassinations). But this place, like the street peddlers, is in it to make a buck off tourists. In less touristy areas, or areas not given to leisurely lifestyles, you’re unlikely to find a bookshop with novels, unless they’re the novels assigned by the nearest school curriculum.

It’s fitting then that a chapter of Agida’s Between the Assassinations tells the story of an illiterate bootleg bookseller who causes a scandal when he unwittingly puts out a copy of The Satanic Verses on his street corner shop; a chapter that would have been less significant had I not read it in India.

The stunning lucidity of Sarah Palin continued in yesterday’s “farewell” speech – which was rather stump-esque – from chastising the media for their “lies” which, naturally, hurt the troops; to resource preservation, resources defended by our troops; to praising the troops that are currently being deployed (probably for their 5th or 6th tour).

Palin then proceeded to tick off the numerous accomplishments of her administration, accomplishments which the lying liberal elite media bastards (who, don’t forget, hate the troops) have already indicted as rather dubious.

One thing I couldn’t help but notice, whether it was intentional or not, the speech was rife with rhyme and consonance.  Oh, but don’t worry, it was just as syntactically appalling as you’d expect from Palin.  Chalk it up to poetic license, as evidenced by her florid descriptions of Alaskan landscape:

North To The Future – a poetic excerpt from Sarah Palin’s farewell speech

Soaring through Nature’s finest show
Denali, the great one
Soaring
Under the midnight sun
Ice-fogged frigid beauty
the cold, though, doesn’t split the chachackos from the sourdoughs
Then in the summer time
150 degrees hotter than just some months ago
Than just some months from now
Fire-weed blooming along the frost heaves
And merciless rivers
That are rushing and carving and reminding us that here
Mother Nature wins

A tad too sanguine for my taste, but I’m sure she can find an audience among the Joe the Plumber loving cat owner demographic.

And why is she quitting again?  “It is because I love Alaska this much, sir…”  So much so that I am going to to drop out of my position before the shit storm hits from my refusal of the stimulus funds and so that I can quietly claw my way through these ethics complaints before I ditch you dumpster-chicken hicks for a presidential bid – but I’m just paraphrasing her, see for yourself.

On Monday I will be moving from the New Hampshire mountains to San Francisco.  In typical skier fashion some of my friends, Ed and Jay, and I decided to forgo the going-away-party in exchange for a last trip up to Tuckerman’s ravine.  Hiking and skiing Tuck’s is about as low tech as you can get, so I decide to do the trip justice and shot the expedition with the most low tech camera I own, the plastic fantastic: Holga.

We weren’t the only ones who made the trek.

This is the first point where you can get a really good look into the ravine.

Just before we got into the bowl I looked back and saw a thick cloud bank rushing in toward us.  By the time we reached lunch rocks this was the view we had.

After being rained on nearly the entire hike up the left gully we made it up over the ridge and stood for a while in the wind that is always blowing up there and dried off a bit.  The fog was still heavy and knowing that it probably wouldn’t be safe to stop and get some action shots in the bowl, I spent the last frame of the roll on this.  Well worth it, I think.

We hiked back down to the top of the ravine, put our skis on, and tried to navigate through the fog as best we could.  I was pretty nervous about skiing in the fog, especially after the ski patrolers had warned us about chunks of ice breaking loose in the ravine.  But we managed to make it down safely and have a little fun on the way and not 30 seconds after we had stopped back at lunch rocks the fog cleared… how typical

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