Wonder of the World, Floods, and a Familiar Face

The North facade from across the river.

The Taj Mahal was great. I had low expectations (overrated, looks better in the pictures, just another building…) so I was delighted to find myself impressed. We got up at 5am to get there as soon as it opened at 6 and it was well worth it; less crowded, cooler weather, rising sun, and we even got a few photos without any people in. It’s a majestic building and the large gardens and waterways around it are peaceful, despite the crowds of tourists doing the “pinching the top of the Taj” pose (which Ric insisted we do even though I said it was tacky).

Woop look at me, I'm at the Taj Mahal!

To be honest we spent a lot of time in Agra just sitting under trees or in our room under the fan (air-con not in the budget). It was so, so hot, we could barely walk anywhere without collapsing. Right across from our hotel was the ‘Taj Nature Walk’, a kind of park/nature reserve with views of the Taj Mahal. We sat there for a long time under a pagoda, chatting to any other sweaty tourists that came by. Agra is a really green city, a nice change from the polluted madness elsewhere. Another really nice place we sat for an afternoon was directly across the river from the Taj Mahal, known as ‘Sunset Point’. It’s a park that you’re supposed to pay to go into to get the perfect view of the north facing side of the Taj, but seemingly most tourists just walk down to side of the park to get to the river for free. We left before sunset, as it got busy and we were facing north, not west, (not sure why it’s called Sunset Point really).

From Agra we took a night train to Varanasi. Finally a train! It was nice to get into “proper” travelling at last, after our extravagant start to the trip with the chauffeured car and the crazy driver. I was pretty taken aback by the train, it was crowded with people, with extremely narrow walkways, and bodies sleeping at eye level. Even though it was as I’d expected, the sheer number of people boarding at Agra station was mayhem. Eventually we settled in our berths and were rocked to and fro for a mere 16 hours before arriving in Varanasi.

The River Ganges, over twice its normal width, taken from a park near Shivala ghat, where Ric played cricket in the rain with some local kids. 

Varanasi is India’s holiest city, a place of pilgrimage for millions, and the place to come and get cleansed in the holy River Ganges, or Ganga. I have two things to say about the Ganga: firstly, it’s probably the most infectious, dirty, unhygienic body of water on Earth. It is a sewer, a bathing area and a crematorium. Indians come to Varanasi to die so that they can be cremated at the edge of the river, so for starters there are human remains and ashes in there. What disturbs me more is that certain people are not allowed to be cremated, including people with leprosy and small pox, instead they are tied to rocks and dropped in… and people bathe in this water!! The second thing is that there is a whole lot of water right now due to the monsoon, in fact the river has burst its banks and risen over 30m, flooding homes, temples and farmland.

Life in Varanasi revolves around the ghats, the steps that lead down to the Ganga. The ghats are usually alive with people washing, fishing, worshipping, and generally hanging out, but given the current flooding there are no more ghats. A lot of tourists we’ve met have been seriously disappointed about the flood, one girl even booked a flight out of Varanasi the day after she arrived! Ric and I have had a great time though, not least of all because we met up with our friend Anna, the only person who knew both of us before we knew each other!

Flooded ghats: the yellowy-green bush is in fact a fully grown tree, and the reddish pointed roof to the right is a temple!

 Me and Ric met in Peru, volunteering in Arequipa and living in the same house, and Anna was the volunteer coordinator who basically coordinated us both being there at the same time, thanks Anna! With a lot of luck and a little bit of organisation the three of us were reunited in Varanasi and it’s been awesome.

Happy to be reunited with Anna. The girl on the left was selling prayer candles, she was one tough business woman.

We took a tuc-tuc tour of the temples here, which was not in the least bit impressive but we did enjoy it. In the monkey temple Ric pointed out to us the cute baby monkey that had grabbed onto his toe, only for its mother to come over bearing her teeth, snarling, and give Ric a curt slap around the back of the legs. In the evenings pooja (prayer) is performed all along the ghats. We watched a pooja on a flooded ghat, I’m told it was a lot less elaborate than usual because of the restricted space but it was still rather fascinating. To the constant ringing of a bell the Brahmin (Hindu holy man) waved a number of things around in a circle (burning silver snake heads, peacock feathers, smoking coals, etc.) People chanted, sang and threw flowers into the river as an offering to the mother Ganga. It was quite a spectacle to watch, although the bell drove me pretty crazy, pretty quickly. The typical thing to do in Varanasi is to take a sun rise boat ride along the river as the ghats come to life, unfortunately we didn’t get a sunrise thanks to the monsoon, and we didn’t get much of a boat ride due to the dangerously strong currents. Also: we visited the place where Buddha gave his first sermon, we saw Thai-style, Chinese-style, Sri Lanka-style and Japanese-style Buddhist temples, we met plenty of Israelis, tried on sarees (not Ric), got hassled by hundreds of Indians, waded through the old town, got turned away from a temple for being white, did some light shopping and ran up an impressive food bill in the guest house restaurant.

The Brahmin at pooja.

Ric getting seriously hassled by some ladies at the Buddha place.

 Now our awesome threesome are headed to Lucknow!

Favourite people of Varanasi:

The man who bitch-slapped a cow and Lala the fantastic guest house manager who did everything for us, including trying to marry off Anna into an arranged marriage.

Least Favourite People of Varanasi:

The woman with the cute baby who convinced me to buy her baby milk and then went on to show me the entire shopping list she expected me to shell out for, and the cow that kissed me.

Monkeys, Cows and All Their Excrement!

From the jungle village of Ranakapur we drove three hours further south to Udaipur, the Lake City. Udaipur is built around a number of lakes, with palaces towering up on the banks and a five star hotel plonked in the middle. For the first time since arriving in India I’d say the weather was pleasant; sunny but not too hot, no monsoon rains and a nice breeze. We visited the city palace, took a lovely boat ride around the lake and took a cable car up a mountain (unfortunately we were a bit late and it was dark by the time we reached the top!) I also decided to get henna painted on my feet in Udaipur; I’d seen a hand painted sign pointing towards a little blue house down a back alley saying “HEENA MAKE HERE”. I thought it would be nice to get it done in someone’s home rather than in a shop and boy did I get my money’s worth! Inside the little blue house lived a family of four; the father was a local artist and the daughter who painted my feet was studying to be a teacher. I spent a whole afternoon in their living room, chatting in broken English about their lives and mine, the mother made us chai (Indian tea) and gave us home cooked food (chapattis with some strange vegetable I’ve never seen before). It was a great experience meeting a local family; hearing how the father has to mass produce intricate paintings that he passes on to a shop owner only to earn £3 per day; how the house and the two along side it were built by the man’s father and are now inhabited by the three brothers; how the kids are both studying to get good jobs; and I learned a lot about their traditions and the Hindu faith too. I love the henna, it’s so detailed and beautiful and the girl who painted it was so sweet; when I told her it was my first time getting henna she insisted on painting my hand too, as a present.

Cows enjoying the view over Pichola Lake, Udaipur

A long, tedious drive north from Udaipur landed us in Pushkar, a city where once a year, millions of people attend a camel trade fair, but the rest of the year it remains a small, dirty, little town full of people trying to sell to you or scam you. We took a look at the holy lake where pilgrims go to bathe in the holy water. We managed a paddle but it was pretty grim. We also went to a temple dedicated to Brahma, the Hindu God who created the world, but it was full of wasps so we didn’t stick around there too long either. I wasn’t at all keen on Pushkar as a city but it did have a fantastic vegetarian kebab shop where we got naan rolls stuffed with falafel, hummus, salad and chips, a welcome change from curry!

My gnarly feet looking a little more glam than usual.

After one night in Pushkar (and more kebabs for breakfast!) we drove to “the Pink City”, Jaipur; the capital of Rajasthan. The road was mostly motorway, boring in most countries but not in India. Imagine a motorway in any ‘civilised’ country: six lanes divided by a central reservation, hard shoulder, traffic, etc. Now add cows, people, camels, herds of goats being shepherded from one place to the next, trucks parked in the left hand lane, cars going the wrong way and coming for you head on… and you’ve got Indian motorways!

The rain caught up with us in Jaipur and we spent our first afternoon there wandering around the pot holed, muddy streets. We went to Hawa Mahal, the Wind Palace, which looks more impressive in photos than it does in real life, and we walked right across town the Albert Hall, built by the former Prince of Wales, who was named Albert. The next day was clear and sunny and we visited the Amber fort in Amer, a mountain town just outside of Jaipur. Outside the fort we met a snake charmer who convinced us to pose for a photo with him. Seeing Ric’s face turn white with fear when the snake was placed around his neck was well worth the pound it cost us for the privilege of taking the photo! We took an elephant ride to the top of the fort, which was expensive fun, with half a dozen touts snapping our photo to sell to us at the top. The fort was a bit of a maze, lots of narrow corridors and staircases leading no where useful, and for once I regretted not hiring one of the local guides to show us around. After the fort we went back down to the pink city to wander the busy streets and check out Jantar Mantar, an ancient observatory made up of huge, peculiar instruments used to track the sun’s movement. Outside the observatory one of the touts from the fort spotted us and once again tried to sell us the photos he’d taken of us on the elephant. As it was the end of the day we managed to haggle the price down from £2 per photo, to 5p per photo, and bought all four of them, bargain! In the evening we went back to Jantar Mantar for the sound and light show. To our surprise we were the only visitors at the show and we had the place to ourselves, sitting in the darkened observatory away from the horns and the fumes outside the walls was peaceful in itself, and the show didn’t disappoint. We heard the story of how the Pink City was built (it was the first planned city in India, which explains why the streets are in square blocks, instead of the tangled webs seen everywhere else), and heard how the observatory was made and how each instrument works. The most interesting part for me was hearing how one huge staircase that looks merely superficial, is in fact perfectly parallel with the Earth’s axis, pointing directly at the North Star.

Pure fear on Ric's face outside Amber Fort, Amer

On our way out of Jaipur we stopped off at Galta, a temple complex not far outside the city. The complex is also known as the monkey palace because of the 20,000 monkeys that live there. The complex is made up of several old decaying temples built at the bottom of a valley. At the first temple we met one of the local holy men who briefly explained the history of the temple and then showed us though narrow corridors and staircases to a shire to the Monkey God (whose Hindi name I cannot remember). At the shine we were unexpectedly thrown into some kind of ceremony where the holy man chanted at us, marked our foreheads with orange paint, wiped flower essence on our hands, tied bracelets around our wrists and wished us long happy lives. The ritual lost some of its meaning for me when half way through another holy man walked between us and retrieved his mobile phone from behind the deity! Pleasantly, our chanting man didn’t ask us for any money, only a donation to the temple, which we were happy to make. Further up the valley there were people bathing in holy water alongside cows an monkeys and all of their excrement. We followed the valley up to the top of the ridge where we had a wonderful view of Jaipur to the west, and the mountains to the east, well worth the arduous walk in the early morning heat. After our walk we stopped at the bottom of the hill and had some hot chilli pakoras for breakfast.

Holy water at the monkey temple, Galta, Jaipur.

Four hours later, travelling east towards Agra, we arrived at Fatehpur Sikri, a palace that was abandoned shortly after its construction and has been left untouched for hundreds of years. Our guide book described it as a ghost town, giving me the impression of an eerie, tranquil place, but it was far from it. There were literally tens of thousands of Indians there (dur, it is India). Half were tourists who kept trying to take our photo, stare at us, shout all sorts of random crap at us, and generally make me feel uncomfortable (leery Indian men). The other half were touts that just wouldn’t leave us alone, pestering us to buy things, see their shops, take their tour… it’s like that everywhere in India but in the midday heat in such a constricted space it was really quite stressful and I wasn’t able to enjoy the surroundings as much as I would have liked.

View from Galta, Jaipur.

Monkeys!!!!

All was forgiven though when we arrived in Agra and found out that our hotel has the best view of the Taj Mahal ever, and costs less than £2 each per night! In Agra we finally ditched Manoj, our mental driver, and now we can get on with our travels with one less Indian shouting at us in Hindi.