Jaipur Part 2

Holi is a Hindu festival held in India to welcome the start of spring. It is a time to forget differences and is also called the festival of colours, as everyone celebrates by throwing coloured powder over each other.

So we woke up to the sound of drums on the morning of Holi, and rushed to the window to see the party that had started. Unfortunately it was only 2 boys drumming at the entrance of the hotel and wanting money. Okay, well we were sure the celebrations would be bigger a bit later on. We got ready in clothes we didn’t mind throwing away as we had some idea of what to expect, and went up to the rooftop restaurant for breakfast. As soon as we sat down, the chef and some of the boys working there shouted “wait, wait” and ran off. They returned a few seconds later with a plate full of bags of the coloured powder, and then proceeded to cover us with it, looking really pleased with themselves. We knew this would happen but didn’t think it would be quite so immediate. We proceeded to eat our breakfast which had multicoloured specks covering it from the powder falling from our faces.\

After breakfast we decided to go and see the festivities out on the streets. We thought if we walked towards the town, a 40 minute walk usually, we could see things going on in the streets and there would probably be music and dancing happening in the town. So we set off on foot, and immediately became surrounded by people shouting “HAPPY HOLI!” and smearing us with powder. This was quite amusing at first and we were enjoying the excitement. We carried on in the direction of the town, but soon realized that the journey was going to take a fair bit longer than 40 minutes. Every 5 steps there was another rush of people armed with coloured powder, and each person wanted to smear powder on us, give us a hug and wish us happy holi. I say people, they were pretty much all men and boys. I had been warned previously that as men are allowed to have physical contact with women on Holi which is usually not accepted, combined with the bhang lassis (milkshake made with marijuana) and/or beer, this can lead to some men getting a bit carried away. What I had not realized is this was the case with most of the men. As we walked down the street, two or three mopeds would ride up to us and park up next to us, with six to ten men armed with the powder stopping us and crowding around us with powder and each expecting hugs, particularly from me. Unfortunately the hugs were not always innocent and I found myself being groped at every opportunity which did not make for a pleasant experience. I found a way of trying to fend off the gropes by using a water bottle as a kind of shield and sometimes resorting to shouting “no!” very loudly but still felt very vulnerable when groups of men approached. We kept walking, however, in search of some kind of event. We did find and briefly stopped at the tourist event that was being put on, but it was, as advertised, full of tourists standing around with not much atmosphere, so we left quickly. In hindsight we probably should have stayed there for a bit longer but we still had high hopes of reaching the town centre and finding things there. So we carried on.

As we neared the town centre, we were approached by a Nepalese man who was obviously on something but very keen to speak to us and shake our hands….again and again. He followed us down the road until we stopped at a market stall to buy some more coloured powder. As we were paying, we heard a loud thud from behind us, turned around and saw the man we had been talking to lying in the road. He was bleeding from his head and was unconscious; he had been hit by a vehicle. We ran to help him, and with a few more people, managed to lift him and carry him to the side of the road.  He regained consciousness, but was still bleeding from his head, so I started asking people what the number was to call an ambulance. One man sat with him but was telling me not to call an ambulance, and that he would take the injured man to his house. He then proceeded to haul the injured man to his feet, still with blood dripping from his head, and walked him away. Someone else had called an ambulance which arrived 2 minutes later, but the injured man had already been taken away, I have some suspicion that the man who took him away might have been the person who was driving the vehicle that hit him, and he did not want to get into trouble or pay a hospital fee, and I hope the injured man is okay and did get any treatment he needed but we will never find out. Its hard to step back and accept that the culture is different and you can’t change it, despite what you think is right.

After this event we were a bit shaken up, but still carried on. We reached the town centre, but the streets seemed to be empty apart from the occasional group of men whom I was liking less and less. After walking through the main town and the old town, and still not finding any form of event, feeling tired, violated and fed up of getting powder out of our mouths and noses, we eventually gave up and tried to head back to the hotel. At the time, there was one man on a motorbike hassling us to get on his bike, and one old man with a cycle rickshaw bugging us to get in the rickshaw. We went for the cycle rickshaw, thinking it was the safer option. It may have been, but unfortunately still wasn’t a great option. The man pedaling the rickshaw was obviously drunk and wasn’t in the greatest mood, especially where Holi was concerned. Jonno managed to record some of the event, see below.

The man was also not in the greatest shape for cycling two people around. If there was a downhill he seemed okay but as soon as there was an incline, he forced Jonno to get off and walk next to the rickshaw. After a while of not getting very far at all and the man getting more and more irate, we stopped him and told him we didn’t want him to take us any further. He then pestered us until we gave him 50 rupees for his drunken efforts and then left us alone, to then try and find another mode of transport back to the hotel. Luckily we found a motor rickshaw who did a better job.

We got back to the hotel and decided that we were not ready to just go and sit in the room, so went up to the rooftop restaurant to have some chai. There were a few other travelers there who had also retreated to the hotel early, so we started chatting to them. The chef also came out to talk to us, and was very enthusiastic and flailing around, obviously having had a few drinks. He then disappeared, and the manager of the restaurant came up to us to tell us that unfortunately there would be no food being served for the rest of the day as the chef was too drunk to cook. The chef returned soon after, to tell us that the manager had hit him and fired him. He told us this about 50 times and each time he slapped his own face, telling us how ashamed he was. After a while he left to go back to his village, where he had to face up to his wife.

Seeing as we were in a restaurant chef-less, we decided to go and find somewhere to go and eat and managed to find a basic restaurant which was full of travelers, and had a very disappointing meal of what was claimed to be veg and mushroom noodles but was actually spaghetti with a few scrapings of cabbage. We went back to the hotel, accepting that while Holi may not have been quite what we had expected, it had definitely been an eventful day.

The day after Holi was our last day in Jaipur. While we had managed to keep ourselves busy the whole time we had been here, we were pretty ready to move on to the next place. There was one place that we had not been to which intrigued us, a place called ‘Janter Manter’ which apart from the awesome name, claimed to hold all sorts of interesting contraptions. Its main attraction was a giant sundial, which apparently told the time accurately to the nearest 2 seconds just by the position of the sun on it. It may or may not have done this, as it was not easy to interpret, all we could see was that there was indeed a shadow cast on the sundial but that was all we could work out. Its size was impressive though, although the fact there were steps all the way to the top which we could not climb took away any fun we could have had. There was also numerous mini sundials, and huge bowl shaped items for working out which star sign the sun was in at any given time. This held our attention for all of 2 minutes, and then we got bored and decided it was not worth the hype, so we left.

While walking down the road I spotted a barbers shop, and as Jonno has been looking more and more like a caveman every day, he was persuaded into getting a haircut. We entered the barbers, Jonno looking slightly apprehensive, and he was put into the hotseat. The barber approaching him had an extremely thick pair of glasses, and it seemed like even these were not doing the job, as he had to get his face right up close to Jonno’s head. In fact, the barber looked eerily like my grandfather, who also had similar eyesight. This was bad for Jonno, who ended up with a pretty dodgy looking haircut, but great for me as I was highly entertained, watching the efforts of an Indian Dof and also watching Jonno’s face with an expression of terror as a near blind man approached him with a cut-throat razor.

We also needed to book our onward journey to Udaipur, a seven hour train ride. We went on the train booking website, and selected our train which claimed to have 3 available spaces, but once we had confirmed it and booked it, then informed us that both seats were waitlisted, a similar situation to the last train journey from Mumbai. As we were a short walk from the station, we thought this could easily be overcome by visiting the booking office and obtaining confirmed train tickets. We got to the station, found the booking office and explained our problem to the lady behind the desk. She listened, wobbled her head and said ‘one confirmed, no problem’. We probed further, trying to imply we did indeed think there would be a problem, and she then explained in very broken English that as the train was a daytime one and not a sleeper that we could just use the one confirmed ticket to both get on the train, and by the morning they would probably both be confirmed anyway. Realising that this was the best answer we were going to get, we accepted this and just hoped the ticket inspector on the train would too.

Now there was one major problem that Jonno had which was a great source of angst. The laptop we had purchased in Pondicherry did not meet his expectations, which he claimed was all my fault. Apparently I had put some sort of spell on him which caused him to think more like me and go for the cheapest laptop there was which would do the job but was very basic, and immediately after the transaction had been completed the spell was broken and he realized it was not the laptop for an IT man (Jonno – She’s got me thinking spending 30p for a tea and 1 pound for 2 grilled sandwiches is too expensive, I’ve been brainwashed and wasn’t thinking straight at time. Plus, Lenovo lied to me saying the RAM could be upgraded…). This had caused many sleepless nights for him and he was consumed by regret. He paced rooms, wondering how he was going to cope with a small, slow laptop for another year. We had tried to take the laptop back to the shop for a refund or exchange but they wouldn’t accept it. So we came up with another solution; to buy another laptop which would make Jonno happy, and then try and sell the cheaper laptop privately. We had a look at some computer shops and found one that Jonno wouldn’t be embarrassed to be seen with. The only problem was that they wanted cash for it, and we were feeling apprehensive about walking through the streets with a large amount of cash or a brand new laptop on us. So instead we decided to take a rickshaw there via a cash machine, who could then take us straight back to the hotel afterwards. This was a good plan apart from the fact the rickshaw man then knew we went to an ATM then to a computer shop. We spent a while trying to plan a cover story until the rickshaw driver walked into the shop as we were making the transaction, so all we could do was hope the driver was an honest man who wouldn’t rob us. Luckily he was, and Jonno’s life was now complete, save for now carrying a dead weight of a shoddy laptop around.

We then returned back to the hotel, and packed our bags ready for a very early train to Udaipur in the morning.