So how eventful can the trip from an arrival airport to a hotel be? Well pretty eventful actually. After 20 minutes, the bus just in front of us slowed right down and started to zigzag across the road for no obvious reason. Our driver tried to pass but found the car in front of the bus doing the same thing. Suddenly we made an emergency stop with a ringside seat for a bloody punch-up between the two drivers, with blocked all traffic from the city’s international airport and probably backed up incoming flights from Europe and elsewhere. We prayed for a quick knock-out so we could get to our beds. But of course, all life happens on Indian roads. The flow, if that is the word, is dependent on the slowest denominator, and around Delhi into Rajasthan, this is the camel, closely followed by bullock cart, donkey cart, tuk-tuk and mostly overloaded trucks. This is compounded by a surfeit of more policemen (sleeping) than there are in the Met, all totally redundant since traffic only moves at five mph for the above reasons combined with the ubiquitous potholes which achieve the same end with no investment.
The next day as we got further and further from Delhi into the scrubland desert, villages were generally just one-camel towns. One, however, lacking as they mostly do, electricity and all other mod cons offered a VHS to DVD conversion service. Business I imagine was not good. I would have advised camel servicing and maintenance.
After many long and sandy hours, we made it to our first night stop: a medieval village comprising many beautifully frescoed havelis, or merchant houses from the seventeenth century in the midst of an endless sandy landscape dotted with what looked like olive trees. They have had less than one hour’s rain this year, so the wells are running dry.
Our overnight stay in one of these havelis included a private dinner in the courtyard accompanied by local village dancers and a puppet show before we set off for another long day’s drive towards Bikaner and Jaisalmer close to the Indian Pakistan border on the old trade route from Europe to China. It’s a long slog, desert all the way from Bikaner to Jaisalmer, but so worth the effort.
Jaisalmer became isolated when India split from Pakistan in the late 1940s with no vehicular road connecting to the rest of India until thirty years ago when one was built to transport troops and materiel to protect the border. Dozens and dozens of troop movements were passing us constantly. The location of the ancient walled city of Jaisalmer, perched on a high rock rising from the flat sandy scrubland below is breath-taking, a fairy tale fort 800 years old with turreted fretworked windows jutting out from the city walls; a shame we only had a few hours to explore such a fascinating place.
But the desert soon reclaimed us as we moved south to spend the night in a tented camp far from the madding crowd. Well, there are apparently over 400,000 desert-based inhabitants out there somewhere, but you never see more than a handful at a time.
For a bit of excitement, off into the sand-duned interior by jeep for a Lawrence of Arabia moment. What could possibly go wrong apart from getting a broken differential? Nothing really, just the bust differential, which immobilised the vehicle out in the boondocks surrounded by nothing but afore-mentioned sand dunes, our only neighbours: two buffalo. Panic sets in; the sun is high, water low. But wait, on the horizon, two specks approach. The 7th cavalry? The RAC? Omar Sharif on a camel? Nope, just two goat-herdesses who incredibly were totally ignorant about car maintenance, or so they said. But of course, nowadays there’s the mobile phone, but how to identify one’s position? Just past the third sand dune on the left opposite the buffalo, which were starting to move anyway. Eventually, a passing farmer on a tractor (isn’t it always?) did the business in time for us to get back for village folklore activities by the campfire.
Onwards to Jodhpur and the classic fort but more interestingly the Maharaja’s Mausoleum built by his wife in 1906. A few hints were dropped that this was a very fine gesture for a widow to make and a lot less hassle than committing suttee, so we’ll have to see if the hint was taken.
And on to a most remarkable way to celebrate poppy day, see below. The local desert tribe people scrape a living gathering the fruit of the local trees (they do not kill animals) which looks most unappetising, like sheep’s droppings and large tea leaves. However, on special occasions, like visiting gentry (us), out comes the local delicacy: opium ingested by mouth in liquid form (hence the poppy day reference). We moved on to bidis (Indian cigarettes) and the hookah for a most relaxing time until the dreaded carpet-selling moment arrived. While, allegedly it takes months to produce one rug, there seemed to be unlimited supplies of ‘ones I made earlier’.
And finally into the fallout from a local monsoon which brought very unusual rain clouds and wet roads as we approached one of the many Jain Temples built in the fifteenth century, a 1,444 columned wedding cake of a temple used by followers of the minority Jain religion, the Waitrose of the bunch for top people, but with strings. All animal products (leather shoes, jackets etc.) had to be removed before entry (as life is even more sacred than for Buddhists) and if you want to join up, you must have all body hair shaved off. Followers wear white robes, but the seniors go naked (men only), so I guess I’ll pass for now. The building is elaborately carved and looks as good as the day it was built, using ingredients like ghee (butter) as cement. An opportunity for European butter mountains?
Finally, an observation about foreign visitors here today: they are mainly French, and they are all eating Indian food, coming from a country where Indian restaurants have never taken off. Amazing. We spent all those years trying to keep the French out of India, and now they are colonising it all over again. I truly have never seen such numbers of French tourists in any other country; they must have super-efficient tour operators (and a strong Euro, of course).
Our motor vehicle is proving to be a bit of a challenge on these roads; we should have gone BOAC: better on a camel.
Tonight, we pray to Ganesh to lift the cloud and return the sun. Travelling around Rajasthan is a bit like the London Underground: it is all colour-coded: yellow in Jaisalmer, Red in Jodhpur, white in Udaipur and pink (well, a kind of orange) in Jaipur. Entertainment is provided not by out-of-work busking musicians, but by snake charmers on every corner for the tourist shilling (actually they want euros now), but first, a few general comments about life in India. You might say it is the original throwaway society; everything is thrown out and unless it is eaten by a passing cow, nothing is ever swept away; there are no apparent rubbish takeaway services. The best-kept village is a concept which will never catch on here; possibly the not-quite-the-worst-kept village.
And then there is the ubiquitous questionnaire which is much loved in this part of the world. It starts on the plane, then in every hotel and restaurant, private transport operator, tourist service provider and pit-stop toilet provider. I used most of the pens I took out for the kids filling out all these questionnaires, sustaining myself on the sweets bought for the same reason.
In the back of beyond in a remote café, the toilet presents you with a questionnaire soliciting your views on how the service might be improved, (from a hole in the ground?) Answer: easily and then whether you would recommend them to your friends. They are also keen to know if you are aged between 40 and 64 and how many children you have. It seems to me that most of the Brazilian rainforest must be going to provide all this paper.
I completed it by saying most visitors would rather just have loo paper (of which there was none) but I know this is not as exciting as a questionnaire with local website. I thought of developing a questionnaire on the topic of completing Indian questionnaires. Actually, I did develop a questionnaire for such a website and found most of the hits are from Ukrainian tractor drivers with one GCSE, aged between 40 and 64, but I digress.
We arrived in Udaipur bearing the gift of rain (showers), a most welcome gift which promoted us to sadhu status overnight. However, it was not enough to restore the lake (with its famous Taj Lake Palace) to its usual level. The City Palace overlooking the lake, however, was magnificent and followed the pattern of other maharajah palaces to a great extent: space for the men, spaces for the women to spy on the men without being recognised and private access for the big man to access his numerous concubines, a perk apparently still in operation until the early 1960s. It was noticeably busier now we were into the ‘Golden Triangle’ of major Rajasthani cities, i.e. Americans for the first time on the trip. The persistent postcard salesman factor also increased exponentially.
The next forty-eight hours proved to be a highlight as we headed northwards back into the remote hinterland, overnighting in an ancient haveli mansion tucked inside a working village in the picturesque Aravalli hills. Here we boarded a local train for an hour’s eventful ride into the hills, with death-defying drops and abundant wildlife, the most memorable being the bold black-faced monkeys that clamber all over (and into) the carriages in search of food when the train stops. This rather frightened not only the younger local travellers but apparently also some of the monkeys too, who left their calling-cards on the carriage floor as they tried to escape the train as it moved off.
We were also fortunate to come across a group of local nomadic tribesmen (identifiable by their red turbans and unfriendly demeanour) herding literally thousands of sheep and camels and donkeys in a slow-moving procession to market, simultaneously slowing our journey into Jaipur. Within a few hours, we were carried from a biblical scene into the raw 21st century: thousands of heavily loaded trucks clogging the highway through miles and miles of roadside marble wholesaler yards storing enough white marble to build a city the size of Bombay. A painful transition into our final destination: Jaipur, again much overrun by tourists, traffic (the worst road statistics in Rajasthan) and aggressive purveyors of tourist tat. The nearby Amber Fort, however, was worth the hassle, surrounded by hills covered with what, from a distance, looked like the Great Wall of China.
And so, time to leave our trusty driver, our friend and saviour over the last fifteen days. It was an emotional moment as he embraced us in a tearful (him) bear hug. I knew then that we had overdone the tip.
However, our travelling partners were much pleased to see that Kingfisher, the maker of their favourite tipple around India, also operates its own airline, on the Richard Branson model. I think Kingfisher is also into male contraceptives and I read that there is even a version that lights up (or glows in the dark anyway), which would appeal to the Indian market who love coloured lights. It is apparently based on the Eiffel Tower (which is illuminated at night of course), but it was not clear if they need to be connected to a power supply to work.
Overall a varied itinerary, in some ways comparable with a tour the Loire chateaux, but with lengthier stages and often challenging road conditions, unique heritage overnight accommodation, welcoming friendly locals, especially their children, peacocks as common as pigeons at home, varied birdlife and a wonderful and colourful heritage.