Jaipur - Gateway to Rajasthan - December 4-5
The 5 hour trip to Jhansi is pockmarked with bus stations, roadside stops and a jam packed bus with bellies, hips and groins pressed into my shoulder. At Jhansi we catch an autorickshaw to where the private bus to Jaipur is meant to leave from. He takes us to a travel agent. We have had enough expience being taken to the wrong place not to trust him and make him take us to the Tourist Office at the train station to verify that he has taken us to the right place which shock/surprise, he has. Whilst I am in the Tourist Office, the rickshaw is surrounded by men, police and other gawkers who spend the whole time staring at Beck like they always do, except this time she is on her own and they are bold enough to stick their heads into the rickshaw. She is understandably freaked out by the time we get back.
We go back to the travel agent and get on the bus to find that our sleeper is a large, comfortable, spongy double bed sized mattress above 4 chairs. We settle ourselves in and read for a while, which distracts us from the fact that, whilst we may be lying down, we aren't actually in contact with the mattress very often. When we close the curtain to go to sleep, we discover the next 10 hours will be spent doing David Copperfield levitation imitations as every bump sends us into the air, and all India's roads are is bumps connected by potholes. Suffice to say we got very little sleep and learned that on buses as opposed to the trains, the chairs are the way to go.
We have breakfast at the train station and catch a rickshaw to our guesthouse which turns out to be in significantly worse shape than described. We get the driver to take us to a number of others, all in the same condition and end up at one recommended by the manager of the guesthouse we stayed at in Agra, even though it was about twice the price. We go to the train station to buy our ticket to Jodhpur for the next day and meet a Belgian couple staying at the same guesthouse in front of us in the queue (serendipity). We then head into town to visit the Palace. The rickshaw driver says it will be 20 Rupees, but for 40 Rupees he will take us to a number of sights and then back to our hotel. This is a regular offer and we agree. We visit the Palace, an observatory where the up to 5 storey high celestail measurement sculpures look like a Dali amusement park, and the Hawa Mahal, a 5 storey honeycomb of small rooms with one way slots in the windows which gave the women of the court the opportunity to observe court and street life without being seen. We decide to go back to the hotel and the driver tries to get us to agree to go to some stores of "friends of his" first. We don't agree and he takes us back to the hotel. I give him 50 Rupees (the agreed rate was 40 but we often give more) and he says no, its 150 Rupees. We then spent the next 10 minutes arguing with him that he never said it was 150, he said it was 40, that if he ever said 150 we would have said no. He follows us into the hotel and explains to the manager that we only gave him 50, and we explain our side to the manager. It turns out that he would have got 100 Rupees from the stored he would have taken us to if we agreed, even if we didn't buy anything and us not agreeing to go means he was 100 short of what he would have earned in the time he was with us and was therefore trying to get it from us. We gave him the 50 and told him that it is not our fault he didn't get his commission. Score one for the tourists (official score - Indian touts 10 billion, tourists 1).
We meet Raf and Katrin, the Belgian couple, for dinner and go to a BBQ place. MEAT, OH MY GOD> MMMEEEEAAAATTTTTTTT!!!!!!. I cannot tell you what torture it is for a carnivore in India. I mean the food is great, but to get some MMEEAATTT!!!! YES!!
The next day is spent walking the bazaar and updating the photos on the web. At 5 we head to the train station for our 5.35pm train. There is an LPG carrier on the platform our train is meant to be on, so unless there's going to be a huge explosion, or it's coming on another platform, something's wrong. We go back into the station and I see that our train number, and a train, have appeared on a different platform. We rush for the train, stopping outside our carriage to show a conductor our ticket and confirm it's the right train and carriage. He says yes and we get on, asking the man in our seat to move, please. He gives us a funny look, like "Bu this is my seat, you crazy foreigneres", but moves anyway. We put our bags down and sit with 6 Indian young men, who ask us, after the train has left, where we're going. We say Jodhpur. They say, this train doesn't go to Jodhpur. We laugh, funny joke. Then we see they're serious. I ask to see one of their tickets. We're on the wrong train. Then the conductor we showed our tickets to comes past and we show him our ticket and say he told us this was the right train. He shrugs and walks off.
Beck and I let go of Jodhpur and Jaiselmer with surprising ease - no regrets, really go with the flow. Not so surprising for Beck but very much so for me. Normaly I would have thrown a tantrum against the rail system, the conductor, my stupidity. None of it. It was "Oh well, where to now then. By the way, where does this train go?"
It turns out that the boys are getting off at Ajmer, and a short bus ride from Ajmer is the very small, laid back town of Pushkar which we decide is our next destination. Beck spend the next 2 hours with the young men engaged in conversation, mesmerised and eating out of her hand (and don't they wish they were :-)
posted by flamethrower77 at 4:14 AM
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