Phone Call on an Elephant
As long as I’m doing the shallow-tourism thing for now, being a skipping-stone across the countryside instead of delving (or doing the pilgrim-seeking-enlightenment thing which India is such a popular destination for), I figured I’d get an elephant ride in Udaipur. Woo-hoo! It’s fun, hanging onto the basket in the sweeping rhythm of the walk, sitting so high up that you have to brush aside the occasional telephone wire or banner (half the ride was through city streets little wider than the elephant). I asked how fast an elephant could run, and he attempted to show me, notwithstanding the few other people, motorcycles, and scooters on the road (plus the odd cow, goat, or boar). The funniest part, though, was as we were passing by my hotel, the driver got a phone call on his mobile; he answered it, and THE CALL WAS FOR ME. (The travel-booking guy across the street wanted to talk to me again about a reservation, and saw us going past, and knew the elephant driver’s number because it’s a small town, I guess.) By the way, this was a block away from where women were hand-pumping water from a well. Once again, ancient / modern / rural / technological are all slapped together into the same stew here.
Speaking of, no description of India would be complete without talking about food. First of all, it’s paradise for vegetarians here. Unfortunately it’s not paradise for me, because of my allergies. I haven’t gotten grievously poisoned yet, but have had to work tirelessly to keep it that way, have had to stop over half my Indian meals after the first bite, and have still had one or two annoying reactions despite precautions. But the alternative is usually British food or American fast food, so I’ve tried to eat Indian as often as I dare. I’ve had some great stuff, particularly the catered lunches at the conference, rice with a dozen different goulashes on hand (and I mean that as a compliment--rather than keeping ingredients discreet, they use more of a wave theory than a particle theory. It’s all about balancing the superposition of flavors.) Though actually, the best food so far was from a random street vendor, a cheese samosa with some kind of spice mix I couldn’t identify but which was peppery and delicious. And the chai is of course excellent. The most interesting ingestion, however, wasn’t food but a hookah pipe--no, there weren’t any drugs in it, not even tobacco, but it was an amazingly rich mixture of fruit and spices. It was like inhaling a concerto: sweet and fruity high notes like brass, with a sort of minty / clovey zing of oboes in the midrange, plus some sort of darker flavor like a string-bass, all forming delightful and complex chords.
The countryside that I’ve been stone-skipping through is Rajasthan (“land of kings”), of which Jaipur was the highlight. Jodhpur wasn’t as amazing as it sounded (yes, certain neighborhoods are almost entirely painted blue, which lends a certain atmosphere, but even a sucker for architectural novelty like me gets over it pretty quickly) and Udaipur was a fun tourist town, but Jaipur had a lot more to see. I should’ve gone to the much-acclaimed temples of Pushkar and Mt. Abu instead. ...but hey, I can always come back. The best thing about Jodhpur was that while there I got an Ayurvedic massage. Ohhhhhh was it lovely. You can tell you’ve had a good massage when you walk out an inch taller and an octave lower-voiced. :) Definitely different from a standard western massage, it had some things I could tell were to enhance circulation (particularly the scalp-scrubbing), stimulating camphor oil as the lubricant, slightly different means of working the tension out of muscles, and some stuff I couldn’t tell what it was for. Jodhpur’s best feature as a place, though, is the fortress of Mehrangarh. Forget what I said about the Jaipur fortress being so unassailable; it was peanuts to this. (In fact, in the five hundred years since it was built, it’s never fallen once.) Mehrangarh has fifty- to hundred-foot-high battlements, on top of what’s already a fifty- to hundred-foot sheer cliff face on two sides. Oh, and it was about a hundred degrees in the sun. You can just imagine being a medieval Mughal knight, or even a turn-of-the-century British infantryman, and seeing this thing you were supposed to attack. Your first thought would be “run away!” and after getting forced back in line by your general, you’d say “hey, I’ve heard there’s this new thing people are trying, called diplomacy.” ...It’s interesting how for 10,000 years of human history (and I guess for the 40,000 years of existence pre-history) it was universally useful to have an elevated walled place as a defense. For the last eighty or ninety years, though, that’s out the window. Useless. Aircraft have changed the nature of war, so there will never be castles or clifftop bastions built ever again; only bunkers, which don’t make good palaces or tourist attractions later.
Udaipur is a scrubby little town on the outside, but inside, the old part of town (let’s be honest, the tourist part of town) is quite romantic. And when I saw it, it was barely a faint glimpse of what it should be, because it’s centered around a lake which is currently dried up. The city palace, the town’s main temple, and the fancy hotels, are all on or near where the water should be, with ghats (stairs going right down into the water), and two of the fanciest hotels are normally islands in the middle of the lake. (One of which was a set in a classic James Bond film.) It’d be breathtaking. ...As it is, they’re palaces in a dingy meadow, but it’s still nice because it gives you room to breathe--uncommon in Indian cities. (And my hotel was five-star style with motel-6 cost--pool and jacuzzi on the roof, all-marble floors, glittering mirrored mosaics in the lobby, and in every corner garlanded statuettes or stone bowls full of flower-blossoms floating in water. Beautiful.) Udaipur has a splendid (and huge) Vishnu temple; and lit up on a dark hillside outside of town, the Monsoon Palace floated in the sky like another constellation. Going there in the day, it isn’t much to look at, but while there I hung out with over a dozen Langour (sp?) monkeys for about an hour. (By the way, I think the langour monkeys’ facial hair inspired the beard-fashions of the former maharajas around here, and from them some Brits of the day.)
Much time has been spent in the Rajasthani countryside between towns, too, on long bus or train rides. Skirting towards the Great Thar Desert, the landscape varied a lot--farmland hills to desert scrublands to eroded lands like Joshua Tree; dry-gold savannahs whose earth was flat as Euclid as far as the horizon in all directions; cactus and marble quarries. Much of the land was lazily bumpy plains, all mustard-dust and washed-out ochre. Also along the way were stern dry mountains, with vertical bundles of rock jutting up out of them like the splintered bones of dead giants. But in these hills would be banyan trees, which I thought were just for swamps (they’re trees with flying roots--partway through a branch, some roots will start down again, and if they hit ground they’ll thicken and dry just like the original trunk, so you get multiple tangle-braided cluster-trunks.) I don’t recommend buses in India, though--they’re boneshakers. There were several impacts per trip so bad that everyone on board was thrown bodily into the air six inches. (I’m not even exaggerating, because once I hit my head on the luggage rack six or eight inches above where my head normally was.) Trains are fun, though, with the chai-wallahs barking out their wares like a mantra as they periodically pass.
Now in Mumbai (though all the northerners still call it Bombay, and I have to say that name has a better ring to it), we’re by the sea, so it’s not just hot--you get a free sauna every time you step outside. It’s beyond steamy, it’s swampy. Like being stuck between two dinosaurs getting it on. Luckily Bombay isn’t really a city of tourist attractions; people love Bombay for the people, which you can meet indoors. Bombay’s people are urbane, liberal, and worldly--boys and girls can hold hands outside; men can have goatees, non-gurus and non-wild-dog men can have long hair and show it; women can have short hair; and there are no livestock on the roads (still lots of stray dogs, but here also cats). There’re lots more white people around, too, but some of them actually live here, they’re not all tourists; there’re even people from Africa & greater Asia, it’s ten times more cosmopolitan than elsewhere. Apparently the richest people in India live in Delhi, but you wouldn’t know it, because so much more money has been put into the actual city here--it’s not grimy and decaying, it’s alive and shiny and lit up; it’s also a lot less aggressive and desperate-feeling, despite how (in the neighborhood I was in) half the street vendors sleep right there on the street--the successful ones on cots lined up like a barracks, the less successful ones sleeping whole families of eight on blankets on the sidewalk, or one guy sleeping right on the concrete, using the curb as his pillow. The people I hung out with in Bombay are two of the other Worldchanging contributors, Rohit and Dina. Delightful folks-- intellectual, fun, and stimulating. Rohit also introduced me to a slew of his friends at a hip club called The Ghetto (which, like all clubs here, you can’t get into if you’re a single male--only couples and special people they already know); we would’ve also gone to a Bollywood-dance bar, but they’ve temporarily been shut down by the government for being too risque. (I asked Dina & Rohit how a country whose temples are full of nude women, phalli, & graphic sex acts can be so officially prudish today; they blamed the Brits.) There is actually some stuff to see here, too--an hour’s ferry-ride out of town is Elephanta Island, which has cave-temples to Shiva carved into it, sort of like a much smaller version of Petra. A day’s journey north of town is apparently a place called Ajanta that has thirty such caves, both Hindu and Buddhist, but unfortunately I won’t have time to make it there.
Next stop, the holy city of Varanasi, where the devout go to die...
Speaking of, no description of India would be complete without talking about food. First of all, it’s paradise for vegetarians here. Unfortunately it’s not paradise for me, because of my allergies. I haven’t gotten grievously poisoned yet, but have had to work tirelessly to keep it that way, have had to stop over half my Indian meals after the first bite, and have still had one or two annoying reactions despite precautions. But the alternative is usually British food or American fast food, so I’ve tried to eat Indian as often as I dare. I’ve had some great stuff, particularly the catered lunches at the conference, rice with a dozen different goulashes on hand (and I mean that as a compliment--rather than keeping ingredients discreet, they use more of a wave theory than a particle theory. It’s all about balancing the superposition of flavors.) Though actually, the best food so far was from a random street vendor, a cheese samosa with some kind of spice mix I couldn’t identify but which was peppery and delicious. And the chai is of course excellent. The most interesting ingestion, however, wasn’t food but a hookah pipe--no, there weren’t any drugs in it, not even tobacco, but it was an amazingly rich mixture of fruit and spices. It was like inhaling a concerto: sweet and fruity high notes like brass, with a sort of minty / clovey zing of oboes in the midrange, plus some sort of darker flavor like a string-bass, all forming delightful and complex chords.
The countryside that I’ve been stone-skipping through is Rajasthan (“land of kings”), of which Jaipur was the highlight. Jodhpur wasn’t as amazing as it sounded (yes, certain neighborhoods are almost entirely painted blue, which lends a certain atmosphere, but even a sucker for architectural novelty like me gets over it pretty quickly) and Udaipur was a fun tourist town, but Jaipur had a lot more to see. I should’ve gone to the much-acclaimed temples of Pushkar and Mt. Abu instead. ...but hey, I can always come back. The best thing about Jodhpur was that while there I got an Ayurvedic massage. Ohhhhhh was it lovely. You can tell you’ve had a good massage when you walk out an inch taller and an octave lower-voiced. :) Definitely different from a standard western massage, it had some things I could tell were to enhance circulation (particularly the scalp-scrubbing), stimulating camphor oil as the lubricant, slightly different means of working the tension out of muscles, and some stuff I couldn’t tell what it was for. Jodhpur’s best feature as a place, though, is the fortress of Mehrangarh. Forget what I said about the Jaipur fortress being so unassailable; it was peanuts to this. (In fact, in the five hundred years since it was built, it’s never fallen once.) Mehrangarh has fifty- to hundred-foot-high battlements, on top of what’s already a fifty- to hundred-foot sheer cliff face on two sides. Oh, and it was about a hundred degrees in the sun. You can just imagine being a medieval Mughal knight, or even a turn-of-the-century British infantryman, and seeing this thing you were supposed to attack. Your first thought would be “run away!” and after getting forced back in line by your general, you’d say “hey, I’ve heard there’s this new thing people are trying, called diplomacy.” ...It’s interesting how for 10,000 years of human history (and I guess for the 40,000 years of existence pre-history) it was universally useful to have an elevated walled place as a defense. For the last eighty or ninety years, though, that’s out the window. Useless. Aircraft have changed the nature of war, so there will never be castles or clifftop bastions built ever again; only bunkers, which don’t make good palaces or tourist attractions later.
Udaipur is a scrubby little town on the outside, but inside, the old part of town (let’s be honest, the tourist part of town) is quite romantic. And when I saw it, it was barely a faint glimpse of what it should be, because it’s centered around a lake which is currently dried up. The city palace, the town’s main temple, and the fancy hotels, are all on or near where the water should be, with ghats (stairs going right down into the water), and two of the fanciest hotels are normally islands in the middle of the lake. (One of which was a set in a classic James Bond film.) It’d be breathtaking. ...As it is, they’re palaces in a dingy meadow, but it’s still nice because it gives you room to breathe--uncommon in Indian cities. (And my hotel was five-star style with motel-6 cost--pool and jacuzzi on the roof, all-marble floors, glittering mirrored mosaics in the lobby, and in every corner garlanded statuettes or stone bowls full of flower-blossoms floating in water. Beautiful.) Udaipur has a splendid (and huge) Vishnu temple; and lit up on a dark hillside outside of town, the Monsoon Palace floated in the sky like another constellation. Going there in the day, it isn’t much to look at, but while there I hung out with over a dozen Langour (sp?) monkeys for about an hour. (By the way, I think the langour monkeys’ facial hair inspired the beard-fashions of the former maharajas around here, and from them some Brits of the day.)
Much time has been spent in the Rajasthani countryside between towns, too, on long bus or train rides. Skirting towards the Great Thar Desert, the landscape varied a lot--farmland hills to desert scrublands to eroded lands like Joshua Tree; dry-gold savannahs whose earth was flat as Euclid as far as the horizon in all directions; cactus and marble quarries. Much of the land was lazily bumpy plains, all mustard-dust and washed-out ochre. Also along the way were stern dry mountains, with vertical bundles of rock jutting up out of them like the splintered bones of dead giants. But in these hills would be banyan trees, which I thought were just for swamps (they’re trees with flying roots--partway through a branch, some roots will start down again, and if they hit ground they’ll thicken and dry just like the original trunk, so you get multiple tangle-braided cluster-trunks.) I don’t recommend buses in India, though--they’re boneshakers. There were several impacts per trip so bad that everyone on board was thrown bodily into the air six inches. (I’m not even exaggerating, because once I hit my head on the luggage rack six or eight inches above where my head normally was.) Trains are fun, though, with the chai-wallahs barking out their wares like a mantra as they periodically pass.
Now in Mumbai (though all the northerners still call it Bombay, and I have to say that name has a better ring to it), we’re by the sea, so it’s not just hot--you get a free sauna every time you step outside. It’s beyond steamy, it’s swampy. Like being stuck between two dinosaurs getting it on. Luckily Bombay isn’t really a city of tourist attractions; people love Bombay for the people, which you can meet indoors. Bombay’s people are urbane, liberal, and worldly--boys and girls can hold hands outside; men can have goatees, non-gurus and non-wild-dog men can have long hair and show it; women can have short hair; and there are no livestock on the roads (still lots of stray dogs, but here also cats). There’re lots more white people around, too, but some of them actually live here, they’re not all tourists; there’re even people from Africa & greater Asia, it’s ten times more cosmopolitan than elsewhere. Apparently the richest people in India live in Delhi, but you wouldn’t know it, because so much more money has been put into the actual city here--it’s not grimy and decaying, it’s alive and shiny and lit up; it’s also a lot less aggressive and desperate-feeling, despite how (in the neighborhood I was in) half the street vendors sleep right there on the street--the successful ones on cots lined up like a barracks, the less successful ones sleeping whole families of eight on blankets on the sidewalk, or one guy sleeping right on the concrete, using the curb as his pillow. The people I hung out with in Bombay are two of the other Worldchanging contributors, Rohit and Dina. Delightful folks-- intellectual, fun, and stimulating. Rohit also introduced me to a slew of his friends at a hip club called The Ghetto (which, like all clubs here, you can’t get into if you’re a single male--only couples and special people they already know); we would’ve also gone to a Bollywood-dance bar, but they’ve temporarily been shut down by the government for being too risque. (I asked Dina & Rohit how a country whose temples are full of nude women, phalli, & graphic sex acts can be so officially prudish today; they blamed the Brits.) There is actually some stuff to see here, too--an hour’s ferry-ride out of town is Elephanta Island, which has cave-temples to Shiva carved into it, sort of like a much smaller version of Petra. A day’s journey north of town is apparently a place called Ajanta that has thirty such caves, both Hindu and Buddhist, but unfortunately I won’t have time to make it there.
Next stop, the holy city of Varanasi, where the devout go to die...