India
part of the On the Road travelogue
 
 
Everyone told me I would get sick in India, no matter how careful I was with the food.  Even native-born friends told me they got sick every time they returned to Mother India.  Well I did get sick, but not in the way I expected.  I got a bit weary of the noise, pollution, scamming, and general overhead of getting anything done in this crowded country.  But despite this, I did have many great moments here.  Oh, and I did get a cold too, which I carried on to Tanzania.

Delhi...

Even as I was escaping rains in Kathmandu, I was not sure of what weather I would hit in India.  I knew I was somewhere between the hot-dry and the hot-wet.  My first day in Delhi seemed to say monsoon, but thankfully the rest of the days turned out to be dry.

Delhi is an interesting place.  Once again I stayed in the budget area of town, right next to the New Delhi train station.  The streets right around the guest house where I stayed were rough, narrow, smelly and filthy - in other words a good introduction to the city.  They were crowded by day with rickshaw, motorbike, tuk-tuk, cars, trucks, buses, and bovine and pedestrian traffic, and at night mostly deserted with random pockets of shady humanity.  There was definitely a life to the streets.  From morning 'til dark, you never knew what you might run into.

I spent the first few days touring the city.  First I went to the old Red Fort, and the nearby mosque which had the best view around.  Another really cool area was the Jantar Minar complex.  This is a series of building-sized astronomy instruments, built as functional timepieces.  They're also pretty cool aesthetically.  Because the city is so spread out, I actually took a bus tour and saw a bunch of the other standard tourist things: the war memorial Arch, an architecturally interesting Tomb, a funky lotus-shaped temple, and old city ruins.  Some interesting stuff.


 

...to Bombay

After a few days it was time to move on, so I hopped a train to Agra.  I hate hype.  The Taj is a beautiful building, and that's all I'm going to say.  Next, I charted a path westward, first to the ruins of an abandoned city at Fatepur Sikra (with plety of cool intricate carvings), then to a small town with a large bird sanctuary.  I have to admit this was pretty much a bust.  The day was brutally hot, and though I tried admirably to bike through the park, I had to give up due to virtual heat prostration.
 
My next stop was the desert city of Jaipur.  This is where I got hassled the most: seems everyone has a brother in the jewel business looking for an export "partner".  Also all of the taxis are price-negotiable, and they will try to drop you off at specific tourist shops to get free gas coupons.  By the last day here, I practically locked myself up in the hotel - good thing it had a swimming pool!  But of course there were some cool things here.  First there was a pretty cool building with an awesome facade.  I also went to the huge temple complex of Galta.  This place is also known as the monkey temple, for the appropriate reason.

I mercifully moved on from here to the pleasant town of Udaipur.  The first day I was here I encountered a festival going on, almost right outside my doorway.  The town seemed to go all out in it's pageantry: the horses and elephants were in full regalia, and then there was the steady stream of women with pots on their heads.  Touring around some more I went into a puppet museum, which was actually pretty cool.  I also cruised around on a rental bike and saw some other sights, including a fountain and an island.  By this time I was about touristed out, and I was able to bump up my flight to Tanzania.  I wanted a few days to explore the Island of Zanzibar before my volunteer program started.  I shot down to Bombay by overnight bus, got my hair cut, spent one night, then hit the air for a brand new continent: Africa!

...next: Tanzania

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