Monday, April 27, 2009

Western Rajasthan

From Mount Abu to Udaipur was a nine hour drive on good dual-carriageway toll-roads. The central reservations of bright flowering bushes put the dreary old M1 to shame, although they probably would'nt be much good stopping an out-of-control truck from heading into the oncoming traffic. After the usual mission of negotiating the narrow lanes with the landcruiser we eventually agreed a price for a great hotel room with courtyard parking within the old town walls, right near the palace. The rooftop restaurant had expensive beer but great views over the city.


Udaipur is where the James Bond film 'Octopussy' was filmed, particularly noted for the lake Palace hotel which was somewhat out of our budget. Roger Moore had shopped in virtually every shop we visted so God knows how he fitted in the time for filming. Unfortunately the lake around the palace was pretty much dried up over the summer period so it did'nt look all that picturesque, but on the plus side it looked like you could 4wd around it. I set out to test how soft some of the grassy areas were but didnt get far due to suspicion that i might be walking through a local latrine-area. So unfortunately that, along with the Amelia's unfounded reluctance to risk getting bogged in front of 1000 tourists and 10,000 locals, was the end of that idea.

Dissapointed I agreed to visit the City Palace instead. This is a spectacular conglomeration of various palaces from the Rajput warriors and the Mughals dating before 1559.


The highlight has to be a horse with a trunk - the Mughals fought on elephants and the Mewars on horses, so cunningly the the Mewars came up with the idea to put false elephant trunks on their horses to fool the enemy elephants into thinking they were baby elephants, and so not be attacked - genius!


There were also paintings of elephants holding massive swords in their trunks and chopping up the enemy which was pretty cool. We were planning to buy some of the great minature paintings sold in Udaipur but I had a Kingfisher Strong hangover and wasnt in the mood for the heat and relentless hassle from the bloody sellers trying to rip you off, so we set off on a ten hour drive to Mount Abu.

Mount Abu is Rajasthan's only hillstation and is unfortunately a bit rubbish compared to the hillstations of Kerala and Tamil Nadu. However its altitude makes it relatively cool, and thus a favourite holiday destination to escape the summer heat of Gujarat. Our GPS said about 1200m and a local said 1700m, so not really sure exactly how high it was. The town consists of hundreds of hotels and restaurants around a lake busy with peddle-boats. Groups of very smart and brightly dressed Indians meander through the music and evening lights, while hawkers of colourful plastic novelties draw interested crowds to their rugs laid on the warm ground.
It was a ten hour drive north west to Jaisalmer, but the dusty desert roads of Rajasthan are great, new tarmac, wide and smooth. Apparently this is so military equipment can be transported quickly to and from the Pakistan border areas. The main hazards are the damn goats wandering all over the place.
Jaisalmer is a medieval walled town in the Thar desert, dominated by a huge golden coloured fort, and famous for camels and embroided rugs.
Given the lack of tourists due to the summer heat, it seemed a good opportunity to get a good price on a rug from one of the many (hopefuly brassic and desperate) devilish rip-off merchants in town. It is quite difficult to enter a shop, look at rugs, not buy anything, and get out within half an hour.

They are all in league with each other, smooth-talking the same weasely lies over a weasley chai, surrounded by rugs being hoisted up by weasley little assistants. Noone will ever tell you what a reasonable price actually is. The good quality rugs made from hand-embroided pieces of old dresses collected from villages always start at a massive RP25000, but really you should pay no more than RP7000. Over four hours later we knew enough about the different rugs, and more importantly what a reasonable prices is, to make a decision and actually strike a deal with one of the snakes.
That evening we drove out to the desert to camp for the night and to meet some camels the next morning.
It was very peaceful and quiet until, in true Indian fashion, three cars of very polite locals turned up to cook on a fire and drink whisky. They were all very friendly and gave us some japati and mutton they cooked, and it was interesting to hear about smuggling alcohol with camels over the Pakistani border.
The camels turned up soon after sunrise and we went for a walk around for a few hours. Amelia's camel had a really manky mouth, mine was faster but probably did'nt get a good nights sleep as it flopped on the ground, knackered at the end of it. We on the other hand were suprisingly not sore at all!






















Sunday, April 19, 2009

The Road to Surat

We reached the Ajanta caves at midday on Tuesday after a long drive from Ahmadnagar. We hadn't read much about the caves, just the brief history. They were discovered in 1819 by a party of British army officers who were tiger hunting. In 1844 an artist was sent to copy the paintings, taking 27 years to do so. His works were displayed in the Crystal Palace in London, and were destroyed by fire in 1866. The Bombay school of arts sent a team out in the 1870's and their copies which were stored in the Victoria and Albert Museum also burned in a fire. In 1918 a team from Kyoto arrived and sent copies of the sculptures back to Japan, but an earthquake destroyed most of them in the 1920's.
Finally, Italian restorers were commissioned to fix the peeling paintings within the caves. Over the years, the varnishes applied darkened and rendered the murals less visible, adding to the peeling as they cracked. They've had a bit of bad luck these caves... Monks used to reside here in the seventh century. The caves run along a ridge at the side of the valley and house huge carved statues of Buddha, various animals and flowers. We gave a Canadian a lift to the next city, Jalgaon, where we all stayed the night and were entertained by a festival of drumming and singing to celebrate a past leader of the lower classes. Our very enthusiastic hotel owner told us to take the highway all the way to Surat, without mentioning the carnage we might see on the way. Blocks of concrete by the road side displayed warnings and advice to motorists;
"Hospital is boring, avoid accidents'' and "This is a highway, not a runway''.

Of all the funny (but also quite serious) incidents we saw, a dark blue small van - sort of like a Toyota Hiace taxi, stood out. It usually seats 9 + 1 (driver) but when we saw it, it held nearly 20 people. Seriously. There was a guy hanging out of the front passenger door, standing and holding on to the roof, acting as a human indicator as the car raced up the highway. We had passed them 3 times already, once just because they were slow, then when they were unloading a passenger and his goods, and then at the scene of an accident. While writing this they just sped past us again. Not so funny on the highway are the buses and trucks. Auto rickshaws race along with anything from 1 to 10 people jammed in a seat made for 2. Outside the car it is 40 degrees, and sitting in the front with that hot wind blowing on our faces we are constantly getting dehydrated. Our fridge is invaluable, a constant supply of cold water. Andrew's team at work gave him a 'nalgene' water bottle holder and we wonder why we never had one in Africa! It is brilliant, as we no longer need to carry a backpack when walking about, and the water stays so cold.

Up into the Western Ghats again, entering the Bansda N.P we came upon an area where a fire had recently ravaged the mountains, and there were clear signs along the sides of the road where vehicles had gone over the edge. Cars pull up beside us to look at the landcruiser while on coming trucks roar towards us. (We just saw dead dog number 14 - gruesome). We saw about 4 serious accidents, just moments after the event along the main highway to Surat. Even though it is a well surfaced road with good signs, the buses drive like they are in a rally, the trucks weave in and out and the small cars often sneak up beside trucks, ignoring the 'Blow Horn Please' signs painted on every truck. Blind corners and the occasional cow add to the hazards. There's no apparent enforced speed limit, people drive as fast as they can. We've seen so many near misses, and use our air horn consistently (sometimes a little too enthusiastically Andrew). It might even have saved our lives! We stopped for the night in an unknown town where we were given new directions north that would enable us to avoid Surat and the congested highway north from Bombay. A small piece of paper listed village names, with no hints of distance or time between places. There were a few discrepancies between spellings, but we managed to roughly map out a route using the GPS and our India map, and headed north. 5km later we were following a guy on a motorbike, who was kind enough to show us which way to go. The new route took us through some towns and villages and a national park forest.



The houses were of a different design in this region (we were now in the state of Gujerat). They were lovely large square buildings with wall that were made from woven reeds and sticks, then smothered with a clay/mud mixture and set to dry. This provided real privacy and protection from the sun. The roofs were tiled. The country was so dry and barren in most parts, with the occasional river still holding water from last year's monsoon. The rains are due soon and the cattle and people will be grateful. There were still some accidents on this route but it was less hectic driving. Once back on National Highway 8 the road was fast and in excellent condition. Toll booths cost us about 100 rupees and were worth the money, with one or two letting us through for free! We took a ring road around Ahmadabad and stayed the night in Ghandinager, a city planned and named after Mahatma Ghandi. We found a nice hotel (too hot to camp) and were convinced that the car would be safe by a man who said his brother owned the hotel. 'I am trusting man. I played over 500 matches as opening bowler for this area cricket madam Ricky Ponting'. How could we say no. Upstairs he organised a reduced rate for a nice A/C room and we grabbed one of the Australian bottles of red wine Andrew bought back, and settled down for a nice relaxing movie. The phone in our room rang and on the other end was our friend asking if we were happy. I laughed and said 'Yes, very. Thank you.' A few minutes later there was a knock at the door, and there he stood with another fellow. We said hello using some of the very little Hindi we know 'nameste' - and in his excitement the man slapped us both on the face! It was a fair whack and made us both laugh. We got changed, and were shown an excellent restaurant with Gujurti thali, all you can eat! A small dish of creamy white sauce was placed on our already full metal trays, and Andrew bent to smell it to determine if it was yogurt to go with the curry-like sauces or a sweet. A waiter ran over and quickly put a spoon in both our dishes. He was worried that Andrew was going to try to eat the sauce by drinking it and with no hands! The look on his face was priceless and I laughed till I cried. We were certainly the entertainment in the restaurant and dessert turned out to be a bowl of pureed mango. We woke fairly early...and drove to the most beautiful stepped well in all of India (or so our guide book boasted). It was indeed very special, being five stories deep. As you descend the sandstone steps the temperature dropped considerably, and as usual the carvings were intricately done. We were shown around by a VERY friendly guide, before heading north to Udaipur.








Wednesday, April 15, 2009

Escape from Palolem

Escape from Palolem...and all the 'nothing' that has been done on the beach of Palolem over the past 2 1/2 weeks. How easy it is to fall into days that are defined by how long you can stay in bed, depending on how hot the room becomes, where you shall eat, and what time the first beer is. I made a list the day Andrew left of all the things I would do to keep myself occupied over the 2 1/2 weeks of his absence. I was going scuba diving, going to have an auyrvedic massage, write to lots of friends and family, buy some gifts, walk to the next beach, attend a 'headphone' party
and lots more. I managed to make some lovely friends, bought a couple of gifts and had two massages but very, very little else. I did actually manage a private yoga lesson on the roof of 'Wavelet Beach Resort' as the sun rose the morning Andrew flew in, with Janine, a wonderful Swiss woman. So after one more day at the beach, to allow Andrew time to wind down after his Melbourne visit, we packed up and hit the road, heading north towards the state of Maharashtra.
We managed to squeeze in a spot of evening fishing out on a boat and the curse of Paddy's fishing rod continues with a 100% failure rate. We did catch an eel on the hand line however. The first day we got as far as Agonda, a beach about 10km north of Palolem. Many of the bars and huts had disappeared ahead of the monsoon but we found a great hut on the northern end of the beach, and some good characters to have a few beers with at the bar including Ging'(er) from Jersey.

Some navigational confusion caused us to somehow arrived in Old Goa which we had visited with Paul some weeks back, and even more disturbingly we nearly found ourselves back in Belgaum. We'd inadvertently stayed there twice during our trek out to Hampi with Paul. With some local help we redirected and set our destination for the first big day of driving in weeks, for Kolhapur, just west of the Karnataka Plateau.

Over the state border in Karnatica we were stopped at a police checkpoint where they were searching vehicles ahead of the elections. 'Oh my God!' said the officer in a good natured way when he saw how much stuff was in the back. 'What is this Sir?' he asked when he found our not-very-well-hidden bottle of Cashew Fenny (Goan local spirit) in the fridge. It is not allowed to be taken from the state. They confiscated our booze making Amelia very unhappy (we'd only just bought it) and an elder policeman who took hold of it, very happy. 'Oh dear, Madam is very angry', said the police officer and they felt it was safer to hand us back the bottle, much to the old guy's dismay. In the end it was all good and everyone took some photos, shook hands and we were on our way again.

It turns out Kolhapur was experiencing some political rallies and if we had more time we would have loved to stay there longer. We spoilt ourselves and stayed the night at Hotel Shalini Palace, the old Maharaja of Kolhapur's Palace.

Today's owner also prides himself as a maker of fine wines and so we thought we aught to try a bottle with dinner. We chose a middle of the range (going by price) bottle, it was supposed to be a pinot noir but was so awful that we left more than half the bottle.

We traveled north/north east over the next two days, accidentally taking a tour of the outskirts of the 2.5 mill populated city of Pune. We were looking for a 'ring road' to avoid the center. The city looked really interesting but we were on a mission to get as far north as we could, towards the Ajanta caves. The highway between these
cities is excellent. There are frequent toll booths, a couple of which we were waved though for free being 'guests' of the men who were taking money.