Playing Catch Up

With our 3-day interruption in internet service, our postings have gotten a little out of order. For those of you who prefer your travelogues presented in a more linear fashion, I thought I would provide a bit of a recap of our trip over the past few days. We left Pushkar on the 14^th and travelled east to the Ranthambhore National Park, where we spent two nights. From there, we travelled south to the city of Kota (no, I had never heard of it before, either), where we stayed in a palace that was owned by the last maharaja of the area. Half of the palace is now a hotel while the maharaja’s 96-year old daughter lives in the other half. It was a very nice place, but I don’t think they have updated the facilities since it was first built. I like to think of it as primitive luxury. We saw the fortress at Kota, and then saw the fortress at Bundi the next day. Nice fort. But what I really liked was the vista of blue houses in the town. I’m sure the blue has some deep significance but I’m clueless as to what it might be. We also stopped at a small unspoilt village that was far off the nearest road. I got some pictures that I really like from that place.

From Kota, we travelled to Udaipur, stopping on the way to visit the fortress of Chittor. This is one monster fort, covering 8 square miles. It is so big that it includes a town of 3000 people, a complex of palaces, and a wildlife preserve. Over the past 8 centuries it was attacked and overrun four times. It’s my personal theory that these attacks were all successful because the invaders could get inside the fort before the defenders even noticed they were there.

A short (and quite possibly inaccurate) history lesson.

As the British expanded their influence in India beginning in the 17^th century, they discovered that it was impossible to exert direct authority over the whole country. So they cut deals with many of the local rulers (of which there were hundreds). The maharajas agreed to pay taxes to the British and keep the peace. The British, in turn, paid the maharajas a salary. Everybody was happy. In 1947, when India became independent, the new government agreed to continue to pay the current maharajas their salaries during their lifetimes. Most everybody was happy. One person who was not happy was Indira Gandhi, and when she became prime minister, she reneged on the deal and cut off the salaries. The maharajas were not happy. It turned out that most of them were also broke. They still owned palaces and fortresses, but no longer had the financial means to maintain them. The more enterprising maharajas cut deals with the luxury hotel chains and turned their palaces into resorts and their fortresses into museums. This is how we came to stay in the palace at Kota, as well as the one here in Udaipur.

Tonight we will take a boat ride on the lake and tomorrow we leave the state of Rajasthan where we have been for the past two weeks and head to Ahmedabad in the state of Gujarat. We are supposed to spend three days there so I can only assume that it’s for a good reason.

UPDATE - I have just learned from our guide that Gujarat is a dry state - no alcohol may be consumed there. I expect that my postings may suffer as a result.

Shopping? Already?

We had a driver pick us up from the airport last night to take us to the hotel. This is quite common here. In fact, there is the huge parking lot just outside the arrivals hall that is dedicated to hired car parking. Huge, but not huge enough, as there are always more cars than available parking spots. The result is that the cars end up parked bumper to bumper, two or three deep. The Indian solution to this problem is for the drivers to leave their cars with the brakes off and the transmission in neutral. When a driver needs to move his car from somewhere in the middle of this pile, he simply pushes one or two (or, in many cases several) cars out of the way until he has a path to the exit. Its sort of like those sliding number puzzles.

Carol did all of the planning for our first day of exploration in Delhi. Much to my surprise our adventure consisted entirely of shopping. Not quite true: as Carol patiently explained it to me, she was just "checking prices" so that she would later know what to pay when she got serious, later in the trip. So even though she didn't actually buy anything today, the net result for me was the same: no interesting photo ops. We did have some fun trying to get back to our hotel from the downtown areas where we spent the day... maybe I should back up. We started off deciding that we would not pay the hotel's exorbitant rate of $30 for the use of an air-conditioned car and driver for the entire day, but instead use taxis and tuk-tuks to get around. Getting downtown was easy - an hour in a taxi to go 10 miles cost us $4. It was when we tried to get back that it got interesting. Indian taxi and tuk-tuk drivers have always been an entrepreneurial lot. With the recent severe down-turn in the economy, they have become a bit more desperate and aggressive. After experiencing the less-than-honest navigation skills to two tuk-tuk drivers in our inter-city travels, we decided to call it quits for the day. We ended up in a rather serious negotiation with one driver and his agent (did I mention that all the best taxi drivers have agents?) over the cost of getting us back to our hotel. The bidding started at $12. Thanks to Carol's superior negotiating skills, that she honed in the small craft villages of West Bengal, we got the final price down to $5. Carol would like to add at this juncture that I totally wimped out during this critical process. I like to think of it as delegating responsibility.