India

Udaipur turned out to be one of the highlights thus far of our trip, although we didn’t know it at the time.  The town is fairly small by Indian standards (a ’small’ town has something like  80k people or more), and set picturesquely alongside a nice lake.  Set in the center of the lake are two palaces, one giant and white and looking as if it were in fact floating on the water, and the other smaller but also very nice to look at.  The larger palace is so exotic that it was used as the home of Octopussy in the Bond film from the 70s.  If you haven’t seen the movie, I highly recommend it, mostly because Bond has a crocodile submarine, which is too cool for words.

We ended up spending  2 days in Udaipur, which we now realize probably wasn’t enough.  Mostly we walked around, shopped, and tried to avoid slipping in cow feces (which peppers the ground everywhere, sacred as they are…).  The only real items of interest from those days are:

1.  We saw a traditional dance and music show during one part of which an older lady kept adding brass water jugs onto her head one by one, pausing each time to do something difficult such as standing on the edges of a round plate and stomping it back and forth in a circle without dropping the jugs.  She had 9 on her head when she either terminated the show at its appropriate time, or simply had too much neck strain to continue. 

2.  Late at night after walking back from a nice and expensive (by indian standards) dinner, we were walking past an apparently empty rickshaw, chatting and enjoying the moonlight, when from the depths of the backseat the driver, who apparently woke up from his nap as we passed, saw two foreigners and whisper-shouted at us in a hoarse Lord-of-the-Rings-Wraith-King voice, “Riiiiiickshaw!”.  This caused Geraldine to scream and jump away, much to my amusement.

At our hotel in Udaipur, we asked about how to continue our voyage to our next destination, which was to be Jodhpur, and were told that the best method was to go by bus.  Additionally, the helpful hotel owner told us that given our plans to continue on to Jaisalamer after Jodhpur, we could in fact simply take the morning bus to Jodhpur which arrived at 2, see the fort at Jodhpur in the afternoon (the main reason to go there), and then catch an 11 o’clock overnight train to Jaisalamer.  This seemed perfect to us at the time.  The man was nice and trying to be helpful, but I still wish a pox on him and all of his family. 

First, we caught the bus early, at 7am.  The ride was great, if you like riding in an uncomfortable bus overcrowded with people, during which the driver continually honks his nifty 3-tone horn for the entire 5 hours at every car, truck, pedestrian, tree, bird, nothing that he passes.  Then, throw in a horribly bumpy and windy road, and just for fun a very poor ’untouchable’ class family that demands money from you and gives you dirty looks when you politely decline.  And heck, while we’re at it, lets have some guy puke from the upper sleeper bunks of the bus (small bed compartments above the seats) down your window in a multiple-stage cascade of smelly vomit. 

As the cherry on an otherwise lovely crap-sundae, when we arrived in Jodhpur at the bus station, the bus was still parking when a swarm of men flooded around the bus, shouting and banging on the windows.  I don’t speak Hindi, but the shouts were something to the tune of “THERE’S ANOTHER ONE!!!” and “DIBS ON THAT ONE!!!!”, as they pointed out the roughly 7 tourists on the bus and laid claim to the right to rip them off on rickshaw rides.  Geraldine was understandably concerned as we exited the bus and they crowded around, shouting at us and not even allowing the space to pass to the back of the bus to unload our bags.  I tried to stay close to her and we pushed our way to the back amid shouts of ”Where you go??”, “Rickshaw????”  The other tourists were similarly harassed, and we had not even a second to talk amongst Geraldine and I given the in-our-faces crowd of shouting men.  When it came to blows between two of them over who had the right to us, we fled across the street, while they were temporarily occupied by the fight.  Soon, they noticed we’d escaped and pursued.  Finally, out of desperation, we hopped on one just to get away from the fray.  

Our destination was the train station, where we still needed to get our tickets onward to Jaisalamer, something that hadn’t been possible from Udaipur.  No  big deal, this would take a half hour or so, then we’d be off to spend the afternoon at the fort.   Nope!  At the train station, I waited in the  ‘Tourist Queue’ line for about  45 minutes  with an English couple, all of us getting more and more irritable about the Indian men who would simply bypass the line and push up to the front (until we started shouting at them until they reluctantly obeyed the line rules we are all taught in kindergarten).  When I reached the window with my cryptic train reservation form filled out perfectly, the woman looked at it, punched some things into her computer and then handed it back to me with a smile.  I enquired about my ticket, and she replied that my form was indeed filled out correctly.  Now if I wanted to actually buy the ticket, I had to wait in the next line over.  The long one. 

So, I joined the English couple in that line, they having just had a similar experience, with a shrug of the shoulders and an ‘oh well, it’s india!’ grin.  We now all stood in this line for, and I’m not exaggerating, 3 hours.  The problem seemed to be two groups, the first an older man who was trying to make changes to 4 different tickets, each one being for 4 different people (we learned later him and his wife had been there trying since 10 that morning.)  After more than an hour, they finished, and the next group started their troubles, which also took forever.  During this whole time, more Indians were trying to cut in line, at which point Jez (the english guy in front of me) and I began shouting at them in barely controlled fury to get to the back of the line.  By the time I had reached the front of the line and managed to purchase the tickets, I was exhausted not only from the bus ride, rickshaw drivers, and standing for 3.5 hours in line, but also because I hadn’t eaten anything since breakfast.  Oh, and the fort had already closed, as it was now 6 at night and dark.

So, in a foul mood, Geraldine and I proceeded to go to a restaurant and eat, then waste time on the internet until our train.  It doesn’t help Jodhpur’s impression on us that it’s the most crowded, noisy, dirty, and all-around most hassley place we’ve seen to date.  So, it is my great honor to award Jodhpur the title of: Worst Place Ever.