Rajasthan Rampage Tour: a Primer

I just got back from 2 weeks across north India with a friend of mine from Watseka, Pete. He’s pretty well-traveled, but had never been to India. With me here, and with some other friends of his in Mumbai for New Year’s, he decided to pull the trigger. Sanju had no objections to the trip (she’s about to leave for Bangkok for a week–vacations seem the norm here), so I met him in Mumbai, and we toured North India for two weeks.

We hit:

• Udaipur, a city on a bunch of lakes, with some amazing palaces on islands
• Jaipur, the capital of Rajasthan and home to a huge fort, as well as a cool old outdoor observatory thing, plus tons of soot
• Jaisalmer, a not-very-touristy-but-totally-should-be desert city in far western Rajasthan, also home to a cool desert fort and camel safaris
• Jodhpur, the "Blue City," named because many of the houses were painted a shade of light blue, using a paint that warded off mosquitos. Also home to a big fort with free wifi.
• Delhi, sort of a home base for the second half of the trip. Home to a whole lot of people, and also an amazing Baha’i Temple.
• Amritsar, the "Sikh Capital," home to their really cool and surprisingly tourist-friendly Golden Temple.
• Agra, home of the Taj, but otherwise a hellish locale.

We traveled exclusively by train, aside from the flight into Mumbai and out of Delhi. That was quite an experience, but I’ll do a full post on that later. Trains in India are a destination in themselves.

I hope these posts don’t get too repetitive. I’ll try to write more about the events than just, like, temple descriptions. But yeah, this was bound to be part travel blog, part updating the ‘rents. So bear with me if any of these drag.

BEAR DOWN

I just got back, and my mind is completely on football. This is alternately known as "American Football" and "what?" here. Nobody really knows what it is, and it's impossible to watch on TV. Partly due to the time difference, no bars show it, and it doesn't show up at all in Indian TV guides. At our last hotel, in Delhi, Pete and I were able to follow Jeff Joniak and WBBM on a web feed, through is iphone, which was connected to the internet via our hotel's [thank God] wireless. The hotel actually had extensive cable TV, which multiple sports stations. They were showing, among other things, a China-Uzbekistan soccer match and the semi-finals of women's table tennis at last year's Asian Games. No NFL. But yeah, Pete and I got the radio feed, which was good enough.

We'd been in Agra all day that day, so we were beat when the game started at 11:30PM here. We'd taken the 6:15AM express train, had a really long day fighting the hellhole that is Agra, and then taken a late express train home. When we left, we actually didn't even know the outcome of the first game, just figuring we'd find out when we returned. But that night, with the Bears up 21-0 early, we both passed out. However, when I got Maharaja's Revenge in the middle of the night, I multitasked with the iPhone to find that not only the Bears had won, but the Jets too. I woke up Pete, and he thought he had to be dreaming. He has several Pats fans friends who were dicks about sports and would deserve to be gloated over. Don't we all?

For the wild card games, we were in Jaisalmer, the least touristy and most out-of-the-way town we went to. There was no wifi in that town. Normally we'd see plenty of restaurants in the touristy areas advertising free wifi, but there was none of that in Jaisalmer. There were only two ATMs in that town, and one was anything but 24-hr. So we didn't find out that Seattle had stunned New Orleans until the afternoon of that Tuesday, when we miraculously got free wifi at a coffee stand inside Mehrangarh Fort in Jodhpur. Via the iphone, we also got to watch Marshawn Lynch's ridiculous run to cap the game, a clip which the old barista watched over our shoulders just to check out the iphone. Pete, as always overestimating English fluency of Indians, attempted to explain it all to him to no avail. I also got to email my parents at this point to inform them that we were alive and not being held hostage across the border. Both miracles of technology.

So staying in touch with football has been somewhat difficult. No TV, not even public, and at the mercy of internet radio feeds. As if I'm perpetually on a Sunday road trip. However, tThe guy who ran the Santha Pub Crawl had lived in Chicago for a while, and he mentioned some sort of Super Bowl Party. That'd start at like 5:00AM here, but I'll have to go. Obviously I'll find some way to watch it if the Bears are in it. And if they aren't, that means I'll have to root against the Packers. Either way I'll have an interest.


One thing to note: on our last day in Delhi, I lost my camera to a pickpocket, losing all of my photos of the trip. This is the biggest of several enormous kicks in the junk that I've experienced in India. The saving grace on this is that Pete took tons of photos, many of which were better than I took (although I DID take quite a few totally rocking photos). So the photography on this will be provided by Pete and his feed. I'm also soliciting recommendations for a new camera.

Rajasthan

Sorry I didn't post this week. Or next week. Or the week after that. I'm touring Rajasthan with a friend of mine from Watseka. Mumbai-Udaipur-Jaipur-Jaisalmer-Jodhpur-Delhi-Amritsar-Delhi-Agra-Delhi. Gonna be off the hook.

Use this time to catch up on my previous posts. For those of you who came late to the game, there're a few good ones in here.

I'll see you all on the 17th. Or the 18th, or whenever I do my first post.