Blue, pink, gold, white cities in the desert

Editor's Pick Award

Our Editors awarded this travel blog entry for providing relevant information that may be useful and inspiring for other travelers.

So far, I've seen Camels that look like MC Hammer, and gotten elephant kisses. Rajasthan is cleaner, very colorful and very chill, but full of Tourons. Ah, you can't have it all. Or, more accurately for India, you get it all and then some. Stay tuned for details!

------------------------ ------------------------- -

I am sitting here at an internet café in Udaipur, getting ready to leave India (sniff!), turning into an ‘aloo’. Just now I went to an out of the way place to get what was said to be the area’s best thali (a traditional meal with several different vegetable dishes, breads, rice, toppings that waiters walk around the room and refill all-you-can-eat style). Sort of a last meal in India. I was stuffing myself with yummy food and a local guy at my table said that I might become an aloo, meaning ‘potato’, the word they use for a round person!

But, back to the beginning. As I took the bus from Delhi to my first stop in Rajasthan, I was immediately struck by the difference in landscape and clothing. We were entering the desert – dry, golden, with scrub brush and dust everywhere. The clothing on men and women is exceptionally bright – with bright neon pink, stop sign red, and parrot green turbans and saris. The women wear their saris differently – with the wrap over their head, exposing more colorful underskirts than usual. And…camels everywhere! Mainly used to pull carts or carry people. Where o where did my cute cows go? They were around, but camels took over many of their basic duties, including eating random plants and garbage on the streets.

Many of the cities in Rajasthan, for various and usually unknown historical reasons, developed a color theme – all the buildings in the old part of a city being one color. This produces some great effects, particularly at sunset, when the color of the buildings seems to be reflected in the clouds. Rajasthanis are famous in history for being fierce and brave warriors, so many of the cities have really impressive stone forts behind or in them, which reflect the color as well. Just like their clothing, even the simplest houses are very colorfully decorated inside with mosaics, mirror patterns, and painting. Many of the wealthy merchants built houses called havelis, and competed with each other to produce more and more elaborate carvings, paintings, mosaics, tiling, and ironwork inside. Many of these havelis have been converted into hotels, and because of tourist competition you can get an exquisitely decorated hotel with romantic candlelit and tiled rooftop looking over the city for very cheap. Unfortunately, I didn’t have a ton of time, so I hopped from city to city, spending 2-3 days each, a sort of wine-flight sampling of colored rooftop views and fort palaces.

The first stop was Jaipur, the biggest city of the bunch, the Pink City. Jaipur was cosmopolitan, but correspondingly crowded and the least beautiful of the bunch. That said, it did have some amazing historical buildings (see pictures) and crazy-cool-huge astronomical instruments. The camels in Jaipur were especially well decorated with jewelry, necklaces, tapestries, and intricate designs cut into their fur. One camel, with ballooning rainbow fabric covering his flanks and crazy triangles and stripes shaved into his hair, particularly reminded me of MC Hammer. Also lots of elephants hanging about, as transport. I was standing next to one large elephant, paging through a guide book, when he reached out his trunk towards my face. My normal instinct when encountering an elephant in, say, Philadelphia would be to duck away, but he reached out in such a gentle way that I stood still and let him kiss me with the end of his trunk. A few seconds later his owner looked up and panicked, “watch out!”, and the elephant slowly took his trunk away. The owner said that this elephant was particularly mean, and he was pleasantly amused that the elephant had been so gentle towards me. I took this as a good sign that I was starting to fit in with at least the fauna of India if not the people.

One fun sight in Jaipur was the City Palace, ½ museum and ½ mayoral residence. When I visited it was being very lavishly deorated for a huge wedding. Got the story that an American Sikh was marrying an Indian fashion designer, and everyone who was anyone was coming, including Bill Clinton. Hundreds of people were buzzing around hand making numerous and large fresh flower arrangements, jeweled door hangings, and even custom chairs and wrought iron moveable fireplaces! I hung around to see the first few guests arrive in antique cars and limousines with their sparking saris and bling bling – didn’t get to see Bill in person but saw his picture in the paper the next day.

I continued the opulence by visiting India’s most famous movie theatre (and Indians take their movies seriously) in Jaipur. The outside has whimsical pink and white poofs and curves, and the inside looks like a Disney princess theme park. It holds thousands of people and was packed for my movie, which I loved, even though it didn’t have the typical Bollywood group MJ-style choreography or horribly cathartic love story.

On to Pushkar, which was everything that Jaipur wasn’t: small, quiet, clean, and very laid-back, with brilliantly white washed buildings surrounding a sparkling lake. Never thought I’d use the words ‘brilliant’ or ‘sparkling’ when describing an Indian town (surprised that Word here doesn’t automatically highlight them as grammatical errors) but here’s the key: no motors allowed. That’s right, no rickshaws, motorcycles, or buses careening through small alleys. Ah, go ahead, take a deep breath, that’s what fresh air tastes like!

The lake in Pushkar is considered holy, and there are many pilgrims who come to bathe and do puja here – sort of a mini Varanasi. The rest of the population seems to be made up of two groups: western hippies that haven’t left for years, and wedding bands. The hippies, both the newer younger versions and many 50-60 year old originals, seem to have settled into Pushkar because of (or perhaps creating) the very serene atmosphere. There are always drum circles at sunset, and meditating dred-locked tie died folks to side-step at the lake front ghats. I am amused to be pleasantly thanked with beatific smiles for everything that I do (“thank you for sitting next to me”, “thank you for listening to my drums”). The only thing harder to avoid are the wedding bands – made up of many horns, drums, and cheesy keyboards, playing in a 7^th grade band out-of-tune, enthusiastic, devil-may-care blast as they wind their way down the tiny tiny streets.

It is wedding season and, just like in Varanasi where we saw couple after bedecked couple come down to the water to be blessed, Pushkar is a wedding magnet. Because it is so small, and weddings involve at least 48 hours of round the clock processing, there was constant horn blasting the entire time, with parading weddings often running into each other or crowding into tiny corners to get some shade. I am still amazed by the detail, color, and especially variety of the wedding traditions. Every state has very different wedding clothing, jewelry, rituals. Here, all the women of the family dress like the bride, in ornate and heavily jeweled red saris. They carry pots of water on their head (it is easy to imagine why water is considered lucky around these parts). At night they walk holding electric chandeliers, with a generator on the cart adding to the din.

Would have loved to chill longer and perhaps stop washing my hair but, alas, I was off to Jodhpur. Luckily Jodhpur was my favorite place in Rajasthan, a deep blue city, with many old and intricate havelis, with a larger than life stone fort on a cliff as a backdrop. Only pictures can really do it justice. The fort itself was very well preserved, with a beautiful palace inside, as well as weapons and cannon displays on the ramparts. Once I got my bearings among this particular maze of tiny winding alleys, I had some great experiences meeting friendly locals, including an older man and teenage granddaughter who spontaneously showed me around their haveli, with the 400 year old wood carved doors, mini temples and painting still well preserved, saying “look antique!” at every new corner; and the wedding procession that dragged me inside their circle to dance in the middle of the street at 9pm, surrounded by those crazy electrical lamps.

Also went to a small place that I heard was supposed to have the best lassis in India. When I entered the small shop, I was grunted at and I interpreted a slight head motion to mean to take a seat. I sat down in the only seat not filled by a local with a lassi glass in front of them, but I was immediately gestured to that I was sitting in the wrong place. I noticed that women were sitting on one side of the room and men on the other (haven't seen this elsewhere in India), and everyone's concern made me quickly switch sides without asking questions. Despite the guidebook's recommendation to "try the saffron lassi", and the 10 item hindi menu on the wall, a guy came through the room a minute later and wordlessly slammed a lassi glass down in front of each person. Everybody tucked in so I did to....wow it was really good. After I'd licked the glass clean I made some attempt at an interaction with the owner-waiter, but he merely looked annoyed and tipped his head towards another guy that i assumed i was supposed to pay. New York may have the soup nazi, and Philly the cheese-steak nazi, but I'd found the Indian lassi nazi! Guess success has gone to his head...