The Colors of Rajasthan-Jaipur (Day 5)

Today we headed to Jaipur, the city known for being the “Pink City”. Although the pink paint was faded on most of the buildings that we drove by, you could still see remnants of its colorful history. On our way to our hotel, we stopped at the Palace of the Winds for a quick picture.

  

Before checking into our hotel, we went to Amber Fort, which is on the way to Jaipur. The fort itself is set on top of a hill and it can be a steep climb to get up there. People can even take elephant rides up to the fort so they don’t have to walk up. 

We were told by our tour guide that many of the animals, including the elephants, that are involved in touristy activities are often not treated well. I was happy to find out that Intrepid doesn’t use any animals that aren’t treated well. In Jaipur there were a few snake charmers that were trying to lure snakes out of their baskets in exchange for money from tourists. 

It looks like just another tourist thing, but in fact most of the snakes are drugged and hurt so that they do what the snake charmer tells them. It hurt me to know that most of the animals weren’t being treated humanely simply because the people wanted to get more money out of the tourists. 

In graduate school, we’ve had quite a few discussions about the positive and negative effects of tourism on small villages and even large cities. And here I was in Jaipur seeing it right in front of my face. To help this issue that India and many other countries are facing though, Intrepid has created a foundation (www.theintrepidfoundation.org) that gives back to the communities that their tour groups go to. In Agra (where the Taj Mahal is) there have been dancing bears staged throughout the city as a tourist ploy, but thanks to the Intrepid Foundation, many of the dancing bears have been saved from this money-making scheme and are undergoing treatment.

Although it is often heart-breaking to see these kinds of activities go on, it gives me hope knowing that a huge company like Intrepid Travel is trying to do something about it. Knowing that I have passion for issues such as animal rights, reassures me in knowing that I picked the right career in public health and international development.

Alright well I’ll get off my soapbox now and back to your regularly scheduled programming. Once we climbed up the many steps to Amber Fort and passed all the hawkers trying to sell us postcards, plastic auto rickshaws and paintings, we finally made it to the main floor of the fort. And there was so much of the fort to see!

A room of mirrors

This monkey was such a poser! He loved having his picture taken!

After leaving the palace, we headed back to our hotel to put our bags in our room, have a quick bite to eat for lunch and freshen ourselves up before heading out on a tour around the city.

One of the things I love about the markets in India is that they’re all organized by type of product. So on our walk around Jaipur, we passed by sugar stall after sugar stall and flower market after flower market. Such beautiful colors!

You could find every type of sugar imaginable here

The flower market

We ended our first night in Jaipur with a visit to one of the historical movie theaters in India and went to see Dhoom 3. A great action-packed Bollywood movie! If you have 3-4 hours free, I highly recommend seeing it!

The colors of Rajasthan--Fort Madhogarh (Day 4)

Friday January 17—Day 4 (Fort Madhogarh)

This morning we checked out of our hotel room and left Agra on a local Greyhound kind of bus. We had a 5 hour bus ride ahead of us to Fort Madhogarh, a village in Rajasthan. The bus ride was freezing cold, with the door and windows having air openings—and man was the bus driver horn happy! Indians use their horns how Westerners would use their indicator/turn signals. They even have a Morse Code kind of language (with long and short horns) to indicate if they’re passing on the left or turning or whatever else.

I’ve found that some cultures are more visual while others are more auditory. While India is an explosion of sights, smells and sounds—it’s rare to find peace and quiet with no honking sounds or loud firecracker sounds in the background in India.

When we got to the fort, we were welcomed with a necklace of flowers and ushered into an outdoor kind of living room. 

The fort itself and all the rooms in it were gorgeous, although I soon realized that this would be the perfect place to sleep and be in in the summer, not the winter. When I ventured upstairs to my room, I saw that the windows were in the shape of portholes, with no glass enclosure, only a screen….which in the end, made for a very cold night.

After getting settled in the fort, we ventured out into the village and took a walk around. Since a kite festival had just been a few days ago, we saw so many colorful kites stuck in the trees and even some people still flying them in the sky. On the day of the actual kite festival, apparently there were so many kites up in the sky that you could barely see the sky itself. Pretty cool!

The artsy part of me just loves these doors!

They all just wanted to greet us!

So cute!

Stairway to heaven?

The fort itself was up high on a hill so we had some pretty spectacular views when we were making our way down the hill for our walk into the village. Despite the cold weather, it was still a great day!

Thanksgiving....Indian style

Back home in the U.S. is Thanksgiving. And since I'm not in the U.S. sitting down at the table with my family having a nice big slice of turkey meat and cranberry sauce, I had to make do with the Indian way. Blanche had felt bad that I wasn't home celebrating Thanksgiving with my family and wanted to make it up to me. When we were talking about it in fact, she was under the impression that Thanksgiving was a bigger holiday than Christmas in the U.S. Hmm....that boggled my mind. It just goes to show how people around the world view the U.S. and our culture and holidays. I guess some people think Thanksgiving is bigger because all Americans celebrate it and Christmas is only celebrated by Christians. Buuuut, I still don't know about that. To me, Christmas is a bigger holiday but Thanksgiving comes in at a close second.

Anywho, so Blanche had said that since I wasn't going to be home for Thanksgiving, she wanted to make it up to me. So, earlier in the week we decided that we would go to the movie theater and catch a Bollywood movie then have some dinner at a very nice Chinese restaurant....because who doesn't like Chinese, right? Early in the week, that was the plan. Then of course "India's 9/11" happened and that plan was shot down. So then we said that we would watch the reality tv that was unfolding on tv aka the terrorist attacks and order in chinese food. It was so sweet of Blanche, because being an American, she wanted me to try American chop suey....Indian's version of it. Boy is it different!! The Indian version of American chop suey is made up of tons of sweet and sour sauce, some little chicken pieces and vegetables. What you're supposed to do is take some crispy Chinese noodles, put them on your plate then pour the sweet and sour chicken mixture over the noodles then top it all off with a fried egg. It was interesting for sure! I thought that there was waaay too much sweet and sour sauce but it was a good combination with the fried egg and noodles...gave it a good texture.

This week I was also supposed to have had a Thanksgiving dinner with Dennis (the director of Champlain College in Mumbai) and his wife. That ended up being rescheduled for tonight due to the terrorist attacks. I have to say, they made a pretty good Thanksgiving dinner from what they had to work with. For dinner, we had some chicken with gravy, stuffing, weird potatoes that were white but sweet, green beans and some rolls. And no Thanksgiving is without a homemade apple pie. You know, I was very impressed by all of this, especially for the fact that almost no kitchens in India have an oven. Apparently Dennis' apartment is that rare 10% of apartments in India with an oven. And because of that rare oven, we were able to have our Thanksgiving.

When I was riding home in a rickshaw after dinner, I couldn't believe how eerie and quiet it still was. It was 11 o'clock at night, but for the shopping happy, club hopping area of Bandra, it was very quiet. People still have that fear in them and that cautious nature about them when going anywhere it seems. Other than when the taxis and rickshaws were on strike, I've never seen it so quiet here. For myself, I will be going to my internship tomorrow (after 2 days of not going) but I'll definitely be taking a rickshaw there rather than the train. I'm still a little nervous to take a train right now.

I'm so happy that I did get out of the house tonight and go to the Thanksgiving dinner at Dennis' place. I have been couped up in the apartment since Wednesday night and it's been slowly driving me insane! I can't even imagine how the people couped up in the hotels downtown feel/felt when they were stuck in their room for over 40 hours (without food and water I might add)! So crazy!