Delhi: Rickrolling the Rodeo

We didn’t really hit Delhi too hard. Mostly, this was a city for regrouping and absorbing. I guess I have some regrets on this, because Delhi definitely has some stuff to see, but at the same time, we’d already seen our share of forts, and taking this time to regroup definitely improved the quality of the trip as a whole.

Our first day in Delhi was just a day to crash. We arrived at about noon on the overnighter from Jodhpur, showed up at our hotel, and just slept until around dinner time. A week of walking around every day, sleeping every other night on the train, and then closing things with an all-day adventure in Jodhpur had taken its toll. It was at this point that I noticed my hair was falling out and my snot was gray, and Pete noticed that he had soot in his earwax. Perhaps a week in Rajasthan is approaching maximum western tolerance.

For dinner, we headed to a sort of fancy strip mall called Connaught Place. There, we gravitated to the KFC for food, then followed things up with a bar called "Rodeo," recommended by Fodor’s as trying way too hard to be American western-themed. The payoff was immense. Where to begin with this place? The employees were all in ridiculous cowboy costumes. The bar stools were saddles. Their tap wasn’t properly calibrated, resulting in mostly head on the beer. Their solution to that was to devote a bartender to pouring and spooning out head. This reminded me of the U of C’s dive, the Falcon Inn, where the bartender was perpetually drunk and, rather than give you a decent pour, would just give you two glasses of half head. Rodeo eventually had two Koreans singing karaoke (they were really good, actually), but when we arrived, they were playing the most spectacular 80s mix ever. Safety Dance, Just an Illusion, 867-5309, the works. And Never Gonna Give You Up.






For those unfamiliar, the music video to Never Gonna Give You Up is basically the worst major music video ever. Rick Astley can sing, but his dancing is just awful and the video is completely derivative. A solid internet meme is to trick someone into watching that music video. This is called "rickrolling." As in "I just rickrolled Phil. Pwnd." At its heart this consists of just sending someone a Youtube link and saying "you’ve gotta watch this!" but usually you try for something more elaborate than that. You can create a video that starts legitimately, then transitions to Rick Astley, for example. Or you can be like the Cartoon Network and rickroll the Macy’s Day Parade. The next time you’re at a juke box, scroll to Rick Astley and see if they’ve got it. Anyway, the beauty here was Rodeo had rickrolled itself.

When we got back to Delhi, we really only checked out two things. First, the Indian Rail museum, which we found fitting considering how much time we’d just spent on trains. After that, though, we went to Delhi’s Baha’i Temple. Baha’i is a religion that more or less combines all religions into one set of beliefs. They had a brief reading of scriptures while we were there, for example, and read from Christian, Buddhist, and Islamic texts. They are monotheistic, at least, so I don’t know how Hinduism would jive with that (or how any of these religions would jive with each other, really), but the upshot is that they’re just a really peaceful religion. Ultimately, they’re probably about as weird as Scientology, but the difference is that the Baha’is aren’t suing or fleecing anyone. Rather, they just build really awesome temples and invite anyone to come. And their celebrity corps is more two-bit, including Dwight Schrute, a shortstop for the Rangers, and a guy who played a recurring terrorist on 24.

The Baha’i have a temple on each continent, broadly speaking. The one in North America is actually in Wilmette, north of Chicago. Since it’s easily accessible off the Purple Line, I spent a few evenings during the Chicago Years hanging out there. It’s really well-maintained and just super peaceful. The inside features incredible acoustics, and is also very calming. The Delhi Temple may not be as calm, as it was actually quite crowded, but the building itself is just stunning. It’s shaped like a giant lotus flower in a pond, with enormous grounds around it. This was the only thing we saw in Delhi with that much open space. Everything else was wall-to-wall. And the interior, with silence, no photography, and restricted entry, kept the Indians from ruining it, too (note: whenever a tourist trap turned into a shitshow, it was always due to Indian tourists. Westerners have respect for their surroundings). If you’re ever in Delhi, do not miss this.







The skull of an elephant that got hit by an English train in 1894. The engineer got to keep one tusk, while the other went to the queen:

Jodhpur: Head to Higher Ground

Jodhpur is one of the more recognizable locales in Rajasthan. It was one of Pete’s special requests, and the only one of these cities that I could picture before doing any travel research. In terms of size, it slots below Jaipur, but above the Jaisalmer and Udaipur.



Many of the houses in Jodhpur are painted a light blue color, giving the city a light blue look and earning it the nickname "The Blue City." We learned that this is because they used indigo, which kept the houses cool in the summer and also warded off mosquitos. The look is cool both from afar and up close.





Although Jodhpur’s a decently sized city, there wasn’t a whole lot to do here, other than the fort (there’s gotta be a fort) and absorbing the blue. So we only spent a day here. Took the midnight train to Jodhpur, arrived in the morning, and left that night for Delhi.

Our first stop was the fort, on a hill with a beautiful view of the city, and awesome in the early morning light. This fort was also home to the first wifi we’d had since a brief spat in Jaipur. We arrived on a Tuesday morning still oblivious to that week’s football games. So imagine our shock when, at Mehrangarh Fort, we discover that the Seahawks had whupped the Saints in the Wild Card round. Pete pulled the scores up on his iPhone, then pulled a youtube clip of Marshawn Lynch’s incredible, tackle-breaking run. The 60ish (I’m poor with age estimates, especially when you have to factor in a lifetime of malnourishment) barista at the museum coffee shop came over to check out the iPhone. They do have iPhones here, but fancy phones aren’t nearly as common, and I think it’s quite possible this guy had barely ever seen the internet, let alone streaming video on something the size of an order pad. Pete then tried to explain what was going on to the guy, which was futile on so many levels. Seriously, nobody knows much about football here, and I’m sure this 60-year-old dude had no idea what was happening, even if he could understand the words Pete was saying. Anyway, once we’d had our fill of celebrating the Bears’ impending Seahawks matchup, we checked out the awesome fort and its views, then headed into town.





Pete wanted to bring back some tea, and we found a cool tea shop while exploring old town. A young guy named Deepak sat us down and chatted us up for a while. The whole time I was expecting him to segue to "so... I’ve got these diamonds I need to get to Delhi," but he never did. I can’t say we talked about anything meaningful, but he seemed to enjoy it, and if he had an ulterior motive, he never showed it.

Tea in hand, we headed back to the town center to kill the rest of the day, which was fading fast. Around 6:00, as the sun was about down, we started to notice all of the Asians (tons of Asian tourists all over Rajasthan) were putting on their surgical masks. Stupid Americans, visiting Rajasthan without surgical masks. Air quality rapidly deteriorated during the evening rush, to the point where we made an executive decision to ride the day out at any rooftop restaurant we could find. The only alternative would’ve been to run back the fort, but fortunately getting 4 stories up was enough to make things breathable. Like Jaipur, Jodhpur’s in a big, smog-trapping valley, and when that combines with poor emissions standards and a whole ton of people, things can get ugly in a hurry.

Traveler’s tip: I think one day was enough in Jodhpur. It was a long-ass day with the very early arrival, no hotel room, and late train out, but that’s Rajasthan. None of these towns deserved more than a couple of days, so the trip really has to involve a lot of town-hopping. We smooth-talked a nice hotel into letting us drop our bags there for the day, and we also took a couple of outside naps. That, with a leisurely lunch and dinner, made the day work great. So give Jodhpur one slow, leisurely day.

Next up: Delhi for a day, then turban time in Amritsar.

Jaisalmer: Anthony Bourdain Got High Here

Our overnight train to Jaisalmer was a doozy. For starters, when we tried to board, the door was blocked by a bunch of soldiers unloading crates of something so small and heavy that it had to be ammunition. When we got on, we found more soldiers, who would gradually disembark along the way. One would think the military would have better means of transportation than sleeper class on the Jaisalmer Express, but what do I know? Oh, also, about 20 15-year-olds largely unsupervised. Good times. A scenic ride, though, through some awesome desert.

Jaisalmer is a much smaller town than anything else we’d been to. There’s no airport, and they didn’t film any Bond movies there, so it winds up being less hostile to tourists. This was a far cry from Jaipur, where everyone and his mother wanted you in their rickshaw. The draws here are threefold: the fort (catching a pattern to Rajasthan?), desert tours, and bhang. This fort was unique in that it’s still lived in. It hasn’t been converted lock-stock into a UNESCO site like the rest of the places. It’s just part of the town that happens to be surrounded by walls. No entry fees, and you’re free to explore. You could see everybody’s laundry, right next to guys selling postcards. And since the place is decaying (our guidebook called it an "architectural time bomb") there are all sorts of nooks and crannies to explore. This made it both crowded and private in its different parts.





As mentioned, we also partook of the desert tours. To varying degrees, they jeep you out to the desert, you ride a camel around, and they jeep you back. These range from ultra-touristy evening trips to see the sunset to much more hardcore trips of 2 weeks or longer. We chose the former. Which basically meant we rode some camels around in a circle for an hour, watched the sunset, then drove back. No regrets! This was the only clear sunset we had the whole trip–the only one where we actually saw the sun disappear on the horizon. In every other city, the pollution was so extreme that the sun disappeared long before the horizon. The benefit to those sunsets is that the pollution also makes the sky totally psychadelic, but au naturale has its appeals, too. As for the camel ride, I think an hour was plenty. Those things weren’t exactly comfortable. Or fragrant.





And yeah. Bhang. Bhang is some sort of cannabis product or something. I’m hazy on the details, but according to Wikitravel, they serve it in milkshakes, plus cookies and chocolates as "take-away" packs to bring with you into the desert. Trying out strange Indian drugs while in the middle of the desert near Pakistan didn’t sound like the best laid plan, so Pete and I decided to pass, but we did discover the shop Anthony Bourdain had visited. There’s one legal bhang shop in Jaisalmer, authorized by the government and right next to the fort. We walked by, and it was run by two dudes who’d clearly done too much bhang over the years. If anybody out there watches Tony B, drop me a line if you remember the episode when he gets baked in Rajasthan. I’d love to hear his take on Rajasthani food. And bhang.

Travel tip: there were only two ATMs in Jaisalmer. One was anything but 24hr, and the other was out of cash the first time we tried it. So I do recommend arriving in Jaisalmer with some cash. There were actually plenty of places advertising cash advances against credit cards, but those things are expensive enough in the States. Christ knows the APR for a cash advance in Jaisalmer.

Downtown Jaisalmer:



Pete’s Faces in Places:



Next up: one day in Jodhpur, the blue city.

Jaipur: No, not this way! Not this way!

Jaipur’s a very large city. Not on par with Delhi or Mumbai, or even Bangalore, but still much larger than the other cities we visited. It still had lots of cool stuff, but for as calm as Udaipur was, Jaipur was intense.

In addition to being very dirty, dusty, and sooty, it was the most aggressive city towards tourists. As we sat at the train station on our arrival, we waited for the free car to come pick us up from our hotel (this is common–the place was not expensive). As we waited, no less than 7 rickshaw drivers absolutely hounded us, talking about how awful our hotel was. As it turned out, our hotel was great–it just doesn’t pay commissions to rickshaw drivers who drop off tourists just looking for hotels. As the stay wore on, we honestly couldn’t go 15 seconds without some yahoo coming up to us to say "My friend, my friend, please come look at my store," or "my friend, my friend, where are you going? I’ll drive you." If you replied, they’d follow you and refuse to take no for an answer. If you ignored, they’d snap at you for being rude. I know they were the ones being rude, but it still was quite taxing for this to happen constantly.



In Bangalore, the rickshaws are metered, but that wasn’t the case anywhere else on this trip. Jaipur was the #1 city for rickshaw haggling. Because the tourist destinations were mostly on hills, they rightfully expected some extra pay for that. Further, since most were somewhat out of the way, the standard was to pay a rickshaw to drive you there, wait, and drive you back. This all made the process quite complex, and took the power of knowledge out of our hands. For one trip, though, we wound up with a pretty nice guy who agreed to drive us to a fort and back for Rs.300 (still a rip-off, but not THAT much of one). He chatted us up quite a bit, telling us about his other job as an English teacher, and about his kids. It could’ve been all bogus, but he seemed nice and wasn’t really pressing much else on us. When we got back, though, we asked him to drop us off at a restaurant a few blocks away, and he wanted Rs.350 because of that. When we balked, souring the end of this long day, he exclaimed "No, not this way! Not this way!" He didn’t want our relationship to end on such a note. We were friends! We still had to pay the 350, though.



Anyway, Jaipur DID have cool stuff. There were three forts, Amber Fort being the largest. Some movie was filming while we were there, so one pavilion was taken over by a dance sequence being shot. Based on the moustaches, it seemed like the standard fare of "evil prince kidnaps helpless hot chick; random women dance in the background." The fort itself was huge, and not explorable in any coherent fashion. Lots of wandering through rooms and stumbling upon ancient latrines. Some of the rooms were oddly reminiscent of boss rooms in Zelda–big open squares with some pillars at one side, followed by a small dead-end room (that’s where the silver bow is, right?).




Beyond that, Jaipur had a really cool ancient observatory called Jantar Mantar, full of huge ancient sundials and stargazing charts. One sundial was accurate to 2 seconds. We also got to check out the Monkey Temple, which sadly was not run exclusively by a society of monkeys. On Pete’s suggestion, we took the second half Rs. 10 bag of monkey food and just heaved it at a group of monkeys (MONKEY BOMB!). As expected, shit took off.



Traveler’s note: food in Jaipur was sketchy. The larger the town, the harder it is to find that one good place. We relied heavily on the guidebook, which was dated and composed largely of places that had since jacked up their prices. I recommend doing some research on places to eat before going. Museum cafes only work on a certain level.

Escalator to nowhere:



Next up was Jaisalmer, a desert city.

Tags: Rajasthan

Udaipur: Now Showing Octopussy Nightly at 7:30

After almost a day of training to start the trip, going from Mumbai to Ahmedabad, then transferring, we wound up in Udaipur, The Lake City, also quite uniquely dubbed the Venice of the East.

This city was instantly quiet, calm, and clean compared to Bangalore. Pete had Mumbai as a brief benchmark, and was also struck by this. Living in Bangalore, I’m used to sights like random enormous heaps of trash that are basically ad hoc dumps, construction sites with the workers’ families begging out front, and cow feces EVERYWHERE. In Udaipur, they’d limied things to just the cow feces.



On our way to our hotel from the train station, we noticed two recurring signs. One was a series of signs pointing to Savage Garden, which Pete and I made sure to photograph. The other was restaurants advertising nightly screenings of Octopussy, the Bond flick. I’ve never actually seen it (and still haven’t, sadly), but apparently a good chunk of it takes place in Udaipur, where the eponymous villainess lives in the Lake Palace. We didn’t get to see it because when we tried to on our last night, the restaurant’s DVD player was broken, and we were too hungry to want to switch restaurants. I did see some clips on Youtube, though, and all I can say is that rickshaw chases wouldn’t work like that. It would end within 2 minutes when one stopped for gas or the other blew an axle by flying over a pothole. I really would like to see the part of a rickshaw chase when both have to slow down to 5mph to get over a speed bump.



Pete wanted to pick up a suit and/or shirts while in India, and Udaipur turned out to be the place to do this. Each of these touristy towns has some sort of specialty in terms of shopping, and Udaipur’s were miniature prints and tailors. Most places advertise suits for Rs.3,000 (about $65), but those are pure polyester. For a merino wool suit, the going rate is Rs.6,000. Pete instead bought three tailored shirts for total Rs.3,300, and then began to haggle over an already-made wool suit that fit him perfectly. He wound up buying that the next day for Rs.4,201, with the owner wanting the extra rupee "for luck."



So the tailored clothing here is sorta cheap, I guess. I buy my shirts from Marshalls and TJ Maxx for $20-$25, almost exactly what Pete paid for his. His are probably somewhat higher quality, as they’re tailored and in very nice fabric, but mine are almost exclusively Calvin Klein slim fit, so it’s not like I’m buying crap. The only major advantage was that he got to select his fabrics from a huge array of choices, while at Marshalls you buy by going there once every other week or so for a few months and snagging what’s good when it arrives. As for suits, mine are from Jos. A. Banks, and they’re $150 when they go on sale. Adding tax and tailoring, and I think they come to about $180 each. Pete definitely had me beat there, but he also was buying ready-made. As we were leaving, I mentioned to Jony (the young, friendly owner) that I might come back at some point, and he said it’d be Rs.5,000 each for me. That’s still cheap, but I must say it’s not THAT cheap. You can’t pay for the trip with suits. Since a suit’ll be tailored anyway, the only real advantage is the wide array of fabrics, while Banks only has 5-6 to choose from on the $150 suits. Anyway, I’ll keep looking in Bangalore to see if things can be had more cheaply. We actually haggled really well on the suit, if not so much on the shirts.

As for the sightseeing, Udaipur had several highlights. We didn’t actually get to go in the Lake Palace, as that’s now a privately-owned hotel, but we did take a boat tour around the lake, which was the key, anyway. I’m sure there’s some cool stuff in the palace, but the main thing about it is that it’s in the middle of a damn lake. The city palace was also great. It’s a large complex built up to the lakefront, and in the courtyard they had a light show in the evening that was narrated with the history of Mewar, the kingdom of which Udaipur was the capital. As far as I can tell, Mewar’s history is mostly women ritualistically killing themselves by fire, followed by now-widowed men fighting with nothing to lose. The light show closed by describing the formation of the current trust (I was waiting for the narrator to drop "501(c)"), then trashing the eldest son for suing said trust. I guess public family strife is still a step up from mass femmecide, though.

We spent a night in Udaipur, then took a night train to Jaipur. Which was decidedly less clean, calm, and quiet than Udaipur. But it just showed us, immediately, how different each city is in Rajasthan, the Land of Kings. We didn’t hit another city much like Udaipur, and I’m quite glad we started with it. It was a nice intro to India, before we got to locales that were a little edgier.

Our jump shots:





And again, I apologize for Pete’s photography. My photos were better :)