Rajasthan 2006

6/20/20079:59:00 PM Link |  | Add comment

After twenty years I finally returned to Rajasthan in the fall of 2006.  Fall and winter until March are by far the best times to visit this area as it has a dry hot desert climate.   After the chaos of the Delhi airport, it was sheer delight to see a white liveried driver with a sign wiht our name on it and a nearby agent waiting with flowers.   After arriving at the sleek new Delhi Meridien and checking into our room, we found, of course, that we couldn't sleep.  The 12 hr time difference had kicked in and though it was 2 am. in Delhi, it was 2pm back home.  We did more or less take a nap and woke up for breakfast before meeting with our guide, Raj,for the city tour.

We visited all the usual spots for tourism in Delhi that day.   The most poignant was the Gandhi Memorial on the banks of the Yamuna River.    Visiting the Qutab Minar in the late afternoon was also extremely interesting and steeped in history.  

The next morning it ws on  to Agra and the legendary Taj Mahal.   Having seen the Taj Mahal before, I was prepared to be a bit jaded but I must say that it still awed me as much as first time I saw it 25 years ago.  It's majesty and beauty of craftsmanship is incomparable.  There were also some curiosities as well, such as the cows, sacred in India, used as living lawnmowers for the grounds of the Taj.  That night we spent in the Sheraton Mughal in Agra which was also nostalgic for me as it was where I had stayed on my first trip.   After a visit to the Agra Fort, also very interesting for its history we were off to Fatehpur Sikri and ghosttown carved in sandstone with artmanship that sometimes had you wondering if you were looking at wood rather than stone, so intricately was it carved.  Emperor Akbar, the Great, had it built to commemorate the birth of his first son to his Hindu princess wife.  But Akbar didn't play favorites, and each of his three wives, the Christian, the Moslem and the Hindu brides, each had a palace built inside of the palace befitting their own unique style. 

The road then led us to Samode Madhpur and Rathambore National Park after a rather grueling six hour ride.  During this ride through difficult roads in rural India, I came to truly appreciate our driver, Krishnan, and the value of the horn on Indian cars.  They are nearly as important as the brakes.   After an early morning game drive through Rathambore the only tiger we saw was on the postcard in the giftshop, but other people from the various hotels in our jeep did attest to having seen tigers the previous day.  Unfortunately we didn't have time for another driver as we had to head out for Jaipur.

Jaipur, the pink city and capital of Rajasthan, is the third leg of India's Golden Triangle, the most visited cities of India.  Jaipur boasts many princely palaces and havelis (manor houses), several of which have been converted into luxury hotels.  Although we stayed at the new Meridien in the outskirts of Jaipur near the Amber Fort, which was built in the old style with all the Indian ambience you could ask for, we did dine one evening in the Gold Room of the Rambagh Palace, still the residence of the Maharani of Jaipur, but mostly now converted to a $700 a night luxury hotel.  This, too, held nostalgia for me as I  had stayed in Rambagh 25 years before, before India had been "discovered" and come of age.   Riding up the Amber Fort on the back of an elephant was as fun as it had been the fist time and I even bought the picture that was taken by the entrepreneurial photographers as we exited the fort.  It fascinated me that they could keep track of so many of us!

Our next day turned out to be one of the most memorable of the trip.  We spent the night in a tented camp in Pushkar, home of the famous Pushkar Camel Fair which had just ended the day before.  There were 500 tents, 3 mess tents as big as circus  tents, and the night we were there, only about 15 guests.  Two nights previously they had been sold out.  People from all over India, and the rest of the world come to Pushkar in later October/early November to buy camels, swap camels, participate in camel races, etc.  It's something of a camel rodeo.   Even though we arrived a day late so to speak we got to participate by riding camels out into the desert for two hours.  My companion looked at me very much askance as we mounted the backs of our steeds, as if to say, what have you gotten me into now?  But riding out into the relative serenity of the desert with our two trusty camel guides and a self appointed troubadour was a magical experience, especially after the cacaphony of the crowds in the town who were still in full festival spirit.

The following morning we were off to Jodhpur, the blue city, and capital of the former Mewar empire.   Jodhpur had a more casual, laid back ambience than the Golden Triangle cities and I thoroughly enjoyed our charming hotel, the Ajit Bhawan, the former prime minister's home, who was the brother of one of the Maharajah's.   The main monument to see in this city is the mighty and imposing Mehrangarh Fort.  One of the sobering sites to see is to walk through the Maharani's gate and see the handprints of the Maharani's as that they left on the way to commit suttee, or immolation, on the funeral pyre of their husband.  The British outlawed this act and the last Maharani to do this has now been many years ago, those handprints are grim reminder of that custom.

That night we dined on the roof top of the Pal Haveli hotel, located right in the center of the central market area and watched the lights of the fort illuminate the skyline with the busy city below.  It was a delightful way to spend the evening. 

The following day it was on to Udaipur over the Aravali hills stopping by the exquisite Jain temple at Ranakpur.  Carved out of  marble, the temple made you think of an intricatedly designed wedding cake.  We stopped to have lunch on the way at a little hillside restaurant, enjoying the greenery of the hills into the contrast to the desert that we had been seeing.  

The city of Udaipur was built around Lake Pichola and the central focus of the lake are two palaces, one the Lake Palace, is now a hotel operated by the Taj group and the other, Jag Mandir, is simply a venue which one can visit during the course of a tourist boat trip around the lake.  The other hotels of note in the area are the Fateh Prakash Palace which actually adjoins the grounds of the Maharajah of Jaipur's family quarters, and is very much a historic, heritage hotel,  the Udaivilas, an Oberoi property, and lastly, Devi Garh, some 30 kilometers out of the city itself situated in the Aravali hills and built around an old fort.

Udaipur was our last stop in Rajasthan, and we regrettfully left our trusty driver at the Udaipur airport and went on by air to Bombay where we changed planes and headed for Aurangabad for two nights to see the famed Ajanta and Ellora caves.  The term cave here is applied rather loosely here as the caves are actually temples carved out of mountains.   The Ajanta caves established by Buddhists and then abandoned were covered by jungle until about a century ago when a British officer out hunting came across them.  Because of that the frescoes inside the caves is more or less in tact.   The Ellora caves, somewhat younger, have been more continuously inhabited, often by locals with no sense of preserving the frescoes and who cooked in the caves.  However, the most impressive temple of the group was the Kailish temple in Ellora.  It was impressive for the sheer size of the work.  It took 6000 workmen 600 years to carve this massive temple out of the mountain.   Looking at the inner temple riding on the backs of stone elephants while ou are in the courtyard below,it is hard to imagine that it was carved out of one stone block, i.e. the mountain.  For the amount of effort and engineering that went into this, it rivals the Taj.

Finally back to Bombay and off to home.  What an unforgettable trip!  I'm looking forward to leading my upcoming group on most of this same trip in mid March 2008.  Why don't you join me?