We wandered through the quiet, dusty Delhi Arrivals area wide-eyed with trepidation, waiting for the chaos to crash over us. They're remodeling, so although it was a bit like being in an unfinished building, with wires showing, panels and light fittings exposed, it was oddly serene. Bit like the opening sequences of Doom actually, creeping forward nervously in the gloom, all the time expecting the hordes of screaming Indians/zombies to pounce and start ripping our luggage away/entrails out of us. Luckily for us, Charlie, a very good friend of my dad's from the Bombay High Commission, met us at the airport just outside the customs bit. Delhi airport is nothing like the unbridled chaos of Bombay International, and Charlie led us like skittish lambs hugging our backpacks, outside to his car.
Alright, so we cheated a bit on India: the first three or four days were spent staying with Charlie, in his very nice air-conditioned flat in a quiet residential area of Delhi, scoffing cheddar and Branston pickle sandwiches and drinking gallons of tea, all made by Charlie's lovely housekeeper Baby. (And no, nobody puts her in a corner - but her English, while miles better than my Hindi, wasn't quite up to famous movie catchphrases from the eighties. Plus I don't think she would have seen it. So I had another cheese sandwich.)
On Saturday when we arrived Charlie took us to the Jama Masjid (Friday Mosque, biggest one in India, and pretty amazing it was), then we took a wander around Chandni Chowk, the spice market (our first real taste of the Delhi streets – I think John's jaw dropped then and stayed dropped for the rest of the day. There really is nowhere like India), then we went to the Red Fort, but the queue was a hundred strong and to be honest, it's better from the outside anyway.That night we had a yummy curry cooked up by Baby, chilled out with a DVD and a drink or two. Or so.
Next day we went to Connaught Place, the giant Dutch-doll set of ringroads on which most of the shopping, restaurants and coffee houses are, had a Lazio/Barista/Costa (I LOVE coffee shops in India, they are like little havens of air-con sanity in a mad, urine-soaked world) and a wander around. Charlie took us to a great local curry place for dinner, and the next day while Charlie was at work John and I swanned around Delhi with Baby's lovely husband Sanjay, who is Charlie's driver, taking in the famous sights. Humayun's Tomb was lovely, a little Moghul-era precursor to the Taj Mahal, and the parliament buildings, government buildings and prime minister's residence etc are beautiful sandstone behemoths set in a wide-laned park.
John bought me a beautiful salwar kameez (outdoor pyjamas) in gold and grey, and I put it on at home very excitedly (didn't take it off for three days) to show Baby, who laughed and said it was lovely (we even got a good price on it!!) but was a bit confused as to why I hadn't got a dupatta (scarf thing) to go with it. You don't wear a salwar kameez without a dupatta, so it was a bit like buying a tracksuit and not wearing a t-shirt. I had wondered why the dude in the shop had been so insistent about selling me one.
Two more lazy days with Charlie followed, including a wonderful dinner in a very posh Italian restaurant and a fun late-night music-sharing session (I was disappointed to see that my father had polluted Charlie's collection with all of his yowly world music noise).
On the 6th we took a 6am train to Agra to start our India travels properly (ie. wallowing in shit), on our first Shatabdi Express. Indian trains are a bit of a headache, with 'first class' being crappier than '1AC' (those cabs date back to pre-separation), 'chair class' on a Shatabdi being second class but air-con and better than 2AC, while Shatabdi 'executive class' is first class but better than actual 'first class' (although the food is worse than 'chair'), 1-3AC having both day and night-time berths (1AC best, 3AC worst) and 'sleeper' class also being a chair or sleeping class but the most crap one with no air-con. Then there are the mail trains, other expresses, deluxes, passenger trains (which no one in their right mind gets as they take twice as long and delays are epic)...basically booking a seat is a bit of a lottery.
We were warned about the fungal infestation of touts and bad hostels in Agra, and the place does turn out to be pretty infected. Our hostel was one of the only decent ones we could find after hours of reading and net-trawling, and despite our online booking the day before, they were full. After much bad-mannered insistence from me, and John's reasonable discussion they found that lo, they had a room for us (we play good cop bad cop with people in the tourist industry and it's not a huge stretch – I behave like a heinous bitch and John appeals to their sense of fairness/wallets). It was fetid and hot, but at least it was not a hellhole like many others in Agra. The tuk tuk driver who picked us up from the station became our guide/transport for the day, and we headed off to the Taj. I was skipping with excitement by then, because John had never been before and it really is worth coming to India just to see it. At this point, I shall gush.
We went, we saw, I cried. Again. It really is the most beautiful thing in the world. After that everything might have been a bit of an anti-climax, but weirdly enough the spell wears off after a few hours and no picture ever makes you feel like you did when you were actually at the Taj Mahal.
So we toddled off to the Red Fort and although the mosque (pretty pearly-white domed building) was shut the rest of it is impresive, with loads of inlaid marble and intricate colonnades. We then requested a trip to the old town bazaars, to have a look around. Naturally we were taken to the driver's friend's clothing shop, his brother's carpet factory, and after much forceful thanking, barely escaped a visit to his cousin's marble workshop. After having a look around ourselves though, we realised that Agra is overrated as a shopping destination, and that as the main industries are marble and carpets, we weren't in the market for what they were selling.
Em - Rajasthan
From Agra we started our Rajasthan Tour (ok, geographically that makes little sense, but were disorganised and I reelly reelly wanted to go to the Taj asap). As all the trains seem to leave at 11pm or 5am, we took our first overnight to Jaipur obscenely early (it left three hours late) and got there early evening. Totally by accident we picked a great guesthouse run by a lovely family, whose only drawback was a mosquito population hell-bent on bleeding us dry. We tuk tukked to the old city (pink) and had a look at the pink palace, the big pink facade and the pink walls. Then we went shopping. Jaipur is THE shopping capital of India, and there are whole blocks kilometres long dedicated to different items. There's Bangle Mile, Saucepan St, the Avenue of the Childrens' Tricycles, and many more.
We planned to look at clothes and tat, but shopping in India is a tricky venture. The only way to get a good price is to pretend you don't want anything, at which point the shopkeepers almost garotte themselves with shirts and scarves in their enthusiasm to attract your attention. However, sailing by without looking at anything doesn't help you find something you would like, so you end up straining your eyeballs to see everything in your peripheral vision, while not slowing down, or cunningly slowing down while pretending to do something else, like wait for your friend, (who by this time is tired and a bit grumpy and has had enough of intently not looking at pashminas and shirts). However, the moment you admit interest in an item, said item becomes a 100% unique garment made by a four hundred year-old blind prophetess from purest hand-spun baby sheep eyelashes. So through a delicate process of calling the stuff crap and the guy a liar without actually saying either, you admit grudgingly that perhaps you would buy the thing. He feigns a heart attack when you name your price, you wail unhappily that you have no more money, and so on and so forth (somebody should make an opera out of these routines) until finally you leave having paid twice as much as it's worth, but still not a hell of a lot to you, so everyone is happy
We also took a day trip to the Amber fort a few km away in the hills, which has incredible views across the land for miles. We hiked up the hill ten minutes to a conceivably amber-coloured structure, and wandered around there for a while, before it occurred to us that there were an awful lot of signs around saying 'palace'. After a short discussion with a guard we discovered that the huge structure looming above us a half-hour walk up the hill was in fact the fort. So we slogged up the hill and through the big gate. At first we thought the high-walled courtyards and complexes of rooms were going to be it, but then we found the outer courts, with low walls and stunning views of the surrounding valleys and desert. Happily that was very much worth the uphill trek! >From Jaipur we took an overnight train (3AC, three bunks on one top of the other, not high enough to sit up on and unfortunately not long enough for John to stretch out on) to Jodhpur. Arriving disgustingly early we hopped a tuk tuk to our guesthouse and spent a little while in the incredibly steep, narrow, winding and blue streets finding our guesthouse. It had great views from the rooftop and we had breakfast while we waited for our room to be ready (again they were 'full' when we arrived despite our booking, so we had to wait for someone to check out). We investigated the fort that day, and although it wasn't cheap to get in, they throw in a free audio guide that's apparently very good (we didn't take it, it was hot enough without earphones and a player to carry, and there were good signs and plaques everywhere), and the fort is well worth the money. It's a huge, towering, uninhabited red sandstone thing with really good views of the blue city (and a nice samosa place inside – bonus!).
Another overnight train saw us in Jaisalmer at 5am, and although we were picked up by our hotel along with several other people who had booked the same place, they managed not to have a room for us when we arrived. I became irate. Perhaps unreasonably so, but the whole 'booking' concept was becoming a sore point and it was 6am. The hotel was run by a family of three brothers, one of whom offered to install an AC unit into a little room for us to take later in the day. Knackered and hot, knowing that we didn't want to tramp round Jaisalmer looking for accomodation hours after the trains had come in, we accepted and went for a walk to the yellow fort.
When we got back we found that some people had checked out and an AC room was free, so despite the fact that they had already bought another unit and were installing it in a room for us, they offered us the vacated room. (I later apologised to the staff for my evil behaviour because they did turn out to be incredibly nice, and two of the three brothers were illiterate, so the occasional booking mishap is perhaps understandable). The food at the hotel was delicious, and they have a very good reputation for quality camel trekking, which is the reason most people go to Jaisalmer. We booked a 2-day trek with them, and though it was expensive (£10 each per day, but this is relative to the other tours!) it was well worth it. We were in a small group including two Spaniards and a young Japanese woman. I tried out my Mexican Spanish on the two guys, but given their rotating expressions of horror, disbelief and incomprehension it did not go so well. Central American Spanish is a bit different to Spanish Spanish, and some of my vocab had them in stitches. However, they both spoke some English and one of them, a maths teacher, offered to help me with my Spanish. That stopped after a few hours.
The camel herders who took us out were really friendly, all brothers and cousins, with varying degrees of English. The common language had to be English because it was the only one we could all speak a bit, though the Japanese girl, Hadzuki, had a hard time understanding us, and even more the thick accents of the Indians. And when I wrote earlier that the camel herders were friendly, I meant in a loud, back-slapping, well-meaning, laughing uproariously and making no sense sort of way. The worst/best moment was when the head of the family turned up to greeted us all, then squinted at Hadzuki and bellowed cheerfully, 'Hey, Japan! You man or woman, eh? Yes, she had a masculine haircut, and no, she wasn't exactly a supermmodel, but on the list of questions you really don't ask, 'hey you, what's your gender?' has got to be pretty high up!! If she understood, then to her credit she laughed, but I'm pretty sure she didn't get it, and anyway, he wasn't kidding!! From that moment on the head camel man called her 'Japan woman' and made a special effort to talk to her because she was on her own when the rest of us were in pairs.
The camels were nothing like I had been led to expect, with no kicking, biting oor spitting, and with minimal farting. They were probably the most well-behaved camels in the whole of India, and I absolutely loved riding on them- it wasn't half as uncomfortable as we thought it would be either!
The cooking was all done from scratch, from making the dough for the chapattis to peeling the veg for the curry, there was plenty of water and chai stops were frequent. The camel man even went off to a nearby village to get beer later that night! The evening deteriorated into a series of drinking games (but without the drink) and singsongs (we were joined by two more English on a trek and it all got a bit silly), then we rolled out our camelly blankets and went to sleep. The only problem was the thousands (oh yes) of dung beetles in the scrubby desert, whose habit of flying around at night and crash-landing on your face/mattress/managing to fly down your shirt and trying to nest in your bedding kept me awake. After the first one woke me up crawling down my neck I couldn't sleep. Also the wind gets up at night and whips the sand around rather a lot. So after no sleep and with sand in my unmentionables I was nuclear in the morning until about 9.30. But sunrise was good (I thought it was a myth) and the trekking was fun, so the day ended well!
