4 Months in India...

5027 miles as the crow flies!

Spending 4 months in India was definitely an experience. For a while I have been in love with the country and the culture and still find it amazing, there is never a dull moment! However, at times it nearly broke us and definitely has its challenges.

On our last night in India we sat down in a cheap restaurant and made a list of things we would and wouldn’t miss about the country. Here it is for your entertainment!

Will miss

• Chai- sweet, beautiful chai! This is generally in a shot sized cup and is the sugariest milkiest tea you will ever taste. If you are flagging while in the middle of a crazy hectic city, finding a chai shop is your savior, giving you a place to rest for half an hour and also the energy to carry on. It is best served by the chaiwallahs on trains who at every stop, jump on the train and in a very gravelly voice repeat ‘chai, chai, chai’, serve out as many as they can from an urn they carry, before jumping off the train as it is pulling out of the station

There is always time for chai!

• Low Prices- It is definitely a good country for travelling on a budget if you put any hygiene standards you have to one side. The cheapest room we got was 200 rupees (£2) which was basically a cave with a rock, and other people we spoke to who have been on their own have paid half that for a single room. They will never clean it though and the walls will be stained and your feet will be black if you put a bare foot on the floor. You can also get an extremely cheap meal for somewhere between 40 and 60p called a Thali, which is a dish with some rice, daal (lentil soup), vegetables and chapatti and depending on the place you can get unlimited refills on daal and chapatti. It’s great!

One of the cheap restaurants in Mumbai

• Momos- while technically Tibetan, many places in the north of India have adopted this food too. Vegetables, potato or paneer (cheese) in dough and shaped into small parcels, and can be boiled or deep fried. They generally also come with a hot chilli sauce, and are pretty cheap and nice as a snack (5 momos) or as a meal (10)
• Dosas- Another food which is south Indian and also cheap, dosas are very thin crispy pancakes and can be eaten plain with a dip or have a filling. The one that seems to be most popular with travellers, myself included, is masala dosa which has a potato based filling. And did I mention it is cheap!
• The Colours- India is full of colours, some houses are painted in blues and pinks and signify caste or background, there is colourful artwork drawn in chalks and powders on the pavement, the temples and the statues of the gods, even the trucks are painted and decorated. And the women- in sarees and salwar kameez of every colour and always looking beautiful and vibrant. It makes you realise how dull and grey London is, with most of the population wearing black or dark clothing.

An Indian wedding- so colourful!

• Bangles! For Diana anyway. Colourful, sparkly and they make pretty jangly noises, what more do you need?
• The head wobble- As mystifying as it is entertaining, no person Indian or otherwise has really been able to describe it completely. It generally means yes or I understand, but can also mean I have no clue what you are talking about but I do not want to turn away business. So when you ask a rickshaw driver if he knows where your hotel is and receive a head wobble, it could mean that he will spend the next 45 minutes stopping at various places and asking other people where it might be, but never admitting this to you. It is also very cute to watch a class of children all simultaneously wobble their heads when a teacher has given an explanation to them!
• Cows- In India, the cows rule. They wander wherever they fancy, sometimes choosing to have a rest in the middle of a busy highway and watch the chaos ensue of cars, bikes and rickshaws all swerving around it. Apparently some families even feed the cows the chapattis they have made before the rest of the family can eat! It definitely changes your perspective on these animals anyway, and we have missed them being part of a regular street scene now we have left India.

Won’t miss

• The train booking system- Whoever invented this system for booking trains is really sick and sadistic. You can basically either book a journey 2 months in advance, or the day before at 10am where you have to race to get the small allocation of ‘Tatkal’ tickets. If you try and book in between these times, you are pretty much guaranteed to be put on a waitlist which means if anyone cancels their ticket you are next in line but this might only be confirmed an hour before the journey so you can’t really base any plans on it. As we chose to not book our journeys 2 months in advance as we wanted more freedom, we had to play the Tatkal game. To be fair, it is great they have this emergency allocation otherwise we would have come a bit unstuck, but it meant only really having a journey confirmed the day before and also the booking website does not accept foreign card payments, so we had to go and find travel agents for every journey. There is one last option for train travel- unreserved class, which you can just book at the station the day of travel but it does mean no guarantee of even getting a seat and having to squash yourself into the smallest space, sometimes even perching on the luggage rack. Bearable for shorter journeys- the longest we did in unreserved was 10 hours and luckily we had somewhere to sit but that was still a challenge!

• Bangles! And other shopping- For Jonno. For some reason I really struggle to understand, Jonno does not seem to want to spend hours poring over the long line of bangle stalls and helping me look for the perfect kurta (long top). I’m sure with time he will come to love it!
• Spirituality- For Jonno. Jonno likes maths, science and evidence. And India can be a spiritual country, including the traveler community. There is nothing that irritates Jonno more than having to sit in a discussion about Auras or Horoscopes. Typical of a Capricorn…
• Random hippy travellers boasting about how spiritual they are or walking around with an instrument that they can’t really play but they do it anyway in public places- There are a lot of these type of people in India, and it’s pretty embarrassing to listen to them pretend to be something they are not to fit in with the ‘hippy vibe’ of India. Just stop!!
• Being a woman- For Diana obviously. India is a country that is dominated by men. Women are expected to be submissive, and even after the publicity that came from the Delhi Gang Rape case in 2013, there are still far too many reports of rape in the newspapers. We have met quite a few females who are travelling on their own who say they feel completely safe, but there are times I have felt uneasy even with Jonno with me (group of boys surrounding us on a train late at night- they were harmless but it still made me wary) and I have been groped in crowds before. Also that as a woman you have to constantly cover up and not wear anything showing your legs or shoulders, you get used to it but it does restrict your freedom.
• The dirt, dust and rubbish- India is not a clean country. People seem to take care of their own living space but anywhere else doesn’t matter- litter just gets thrown out of train windows and on the street- we have had some very funny looks by saving our rubbish and trying to find a bin. Also, public buildings, corridors and stairwells have a thick lining of dirt and stains where people have spat out their paan (chewing tobacco which comes out a dark red colour) down the walls. And I can’t even begin to describe some of the toilets we have had to use. As well as being dirty, it is also a very dry country and the air is pretty thick with dust in most places. The effect on its population is evident by the constant hacking and phlegm production noises you tend to hear.

The water in the river Ganges- 'Its clean underneath!' said the guide

• The noise- As well as being dirty and dusty, India is also noisy. This is mostly due to the unrelenting beeping of horns from the traffic- apparently there is an Indian law that if your vehicle collides with another vehicle and you did not beep your horn to warn them that you were there then the accident is your fault- a practice which has now been taken to the extreme of every driver pretty much constantly having the horn pressed throughout the journey. This can become very irritating, especially if you are not feeling too well and have a headache or if you are trying to sleep. Also, the daily tasks and conversations of the Indian population don’t seem to be done quietly, and the hacking coughs as I have mentioned, door opening and closing and conversations can reach the same noise level as a jet plane at around 2 or 3am.
• The smells- As well as being dirty, dusty and noisy India can also be very smelly. There are occasional wafts of lovely fragrant curries or samosas in the air but these are then quickly replaced with the smell of raw sewage and human waste which can often run in open sewers in the streets. You become an expert at not breathing through your nose for a large amount of time.
• The poverty and treatment of animals- A large part of India’s population lives below the poverty line, and it is heartbreaking to see families who have to live on the streets and have no toilet to use so have to go in the open. There are also lots of street children and disabled people who resort to begging, and some people who are in need of wheelchairs having to drag themselves along the floor. All of this can happen right outside of a five star hotel, and the inequality of wealth distribution is evident. Indian people have no benefit system to support them, and older people have to continue working if their family cannot support them as they do not get a pension. It really shows how lucky we are in the Western world as even though poverty exists it is nowhere on the scale it is in India. And even though the cows are sacred, they are not treated well by everyone and other animals such as dogs, cats and pigs get an even tougher time- with not many dogs being neutered the population of wild dogs is out of control, and they have to survive by going through rubbish and getting scraps. A lot of them are malnourished and often infested with fleas and get mange. It is not uncommon to see people kicking dogs, beating horses or throwing stones at pigs. India is a ruthless place for many people and animals.

 

People and animals both have to go through the rubbish to survive

We also decided on our best and worst places that we visited

Best

• Rishikesh, Laxman Jula- A fairly calm place around the banks of the river Ganges and surrounded by mountains, towards the north of India. It is visited by both foreign and Indian tourists as it is a holy place. It is also one of the biggest places for yoga and we ended up returning for a month so I could do a 200 hour yoga teacher training course there. Even if you are not into yoga, there are a large amount of cafes and restaurants along the river where you can spend most of the day relaxing with a chai and a book.

The river Ganges is a lot cleaner in Rishikesh!

• Dharamsala, McLeod Gange- Similar to Rishikesh in its laid back nature but further up north, McLeod Gange is also the residence of the Dali Lama and many Tibetans who came as refugees. There is a definite Tibetan influence and you can see Tibetan monasteries and monks, and eat Tibetan food. There are also some beautiful walks and treks, and afterwards you can treat yourselves to some amazing cakes from the cake stalls (the magic bar is the best by far!!)

• Udaipur- Another laid back place near the ‘golden triangle’ area of India, the town is built around a lake and has some beautiful views and buildings. You can easily spend most of the day in a café overlooking the river, and the traditional dance performance every night at the Bagore-Ki-Haveli is worth going to.

• Bundi- Worth a visit for a couple of days. Not too touristy and fairly quiet, a nice walk up to the ruins of the fort and you can spend evenings in the great company of Krishna at Krishna’s chai shop- a great character!

Krishna- the best chai wallah in India!

Worst

• Jaipur- It might not have been so bad if we had not booked 6 nights there and been there around Holi festival but by day 6 we had definitely had enough of this place! Apart from the Amber Fort there was not much else of interest and the city is full of people who try and pretend to just want to have a friendly conversation but really only want to sell you something. And Holi festival here was too chaotic and it felt like more of a violation with coloured powder rather than a celebration.
• Gokarna- We met a lot of people who were in love with this place on the south coast in Karnataka and spent months here, but we weren’t at all taken with it. There are two main beach areas with beach huts but not much else, and a town area with some temples but foreigners cannot go into most of them. There were a lot of the try hard hippy types I mentioned previously, who were too busy posing in their hippy clothes to be real people. But like I said, other people had different opinions of it. We only visited Om beach however, some people said that Kudli beach was a lot better.

Another thing that might be worth mentioning is how much we spent whilst in India- our average spending was ~£30 per day but this included a £500 yoga course and a £400 laptop (and losing money with Jonno being indecisive!). Most of our meals cost us £2-3 for both of us, our accommodation ranged from £2 (Gokarna) to £15 (Mumbai) but was mostly about £5 or £6 for a double room with private bathroom and fan but generally not very clean. We mostly travelled by train, but took two internal flights and a few buses. Trains were overall better, especially for overnight journeys but buses were more on time.

And that was our four months. There are still places we didn’t get to see and would have liked to, such as Kashmir and Darjeeling, they have to wait until the next trip. The main thing is that I still love India- and Jonno can still tolerate it too (just)! But also after four months we were ready to leave and have some new experiences. India is a crazy and beautiful country but it’s not for everyone and it does test your tolerance levels for pretty much every sense. I am glad for the experiences and the stories though, it’s a place like no other! 

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.

Jaipur- Part 1

So we landed at Jaipur airport in the evening, and took a taxi to the hotel. As we had paid yet again a fairly small amount for the hotel, we didn't have high hopes for it. However, we were very pleasantly surprised when the taxi pulled up outside a very quirky looking building, adorned with trinkets and souvenirs and the air around the building heavy with incense. The manager of the hotel showed us to our room which was so blue it looked like it had been decorated by smurfs, and informed us we just needed to call to reception for hot water (so nice being back in the modern world) and also to call for room service (luxury!!) otherwise there was a rooftop restaurant. On exploring the room, we also had a working TV, an actual duvet and a mattress and pillows that Lenny Henry would be proud of. After we had finished celebrating, we went to investigate the rooftop restaurant. The menu offered such delicacies as tomato cup a soup and maggi noodles (indian equivalent of super noodles), although with many traditional Indian dishes also. Okay, 5 star restaurant it was not but it was cheap so all is forgiven. And at least the chef was enthusiastic.

Our interesting hotel

First thing on the list of things to do was to get some laundry done, by an actual launderette as a nice treat for ourselves. We took the items to the laundry place down the road, which charged per item, and the man in the shop proceeded to count the items to tell us the price. “..17, 18, 19, 21, 22…” We stopped him and told him that he missed out 20 and needed to recount. So he started again. “..17, 18, 19, 21, 22…” After this happened three times, we counted with him and eventually got him to accept there was such thing as the number 20. Not sure whether this was an intentional error or not, but he did it very convincingly, and managed to do it again when collecting the items again.

The next day we went out to see what Jaipur had to offer. We looked at a map, found an area that looked fairly promising called MI road, and jumped in a rickshaw to head there. We explored the area and found a market place. I had decided I was in dire need of some indian style tops, so began hunting for them. However, shopping in India is not like shopping in England. In England, you can walk into a shop, barely being acknowledged by the sales assistants working there, and browse through all items which are on display at your leisure. If you don’t see anything you like it is no big deal. In India, there is always someone waiting to pounce on anyone that turns their head in the direction of the shop, and will drag you in to the shop where every item is neatly folded and stacked so there is no chance of being able to just browse. They will then start tearing out items of clothing from the neat stacks, if you like them or not, spreading them out over all surfaces and making a huge mess. I think the idea is that they hope you will feel so bad for causing such chaos, and knowing it will take them hours to refold all the items, and buy something as a gesture of appreciation.

As most people are aware, I have very specific requirements for my clothes. Not only the colour, but the exact shade, patterns and shape have to inspire me and sometimes even if these criteria are filled, if I don’t have an instant ‘spark’ then I am not interested, nor can I be persuaded. This is also very difficult to explain to a local market stall seller who is pulling everything off the shelves for me, and painful for everyone at the end when there is nothing they have that I want to buy. So we start the long process of trawling through every market stall, leaving a trail of disappointment behind us. Eventually, I see a top that I actually quite like…right shade, right pattern, great. Only thing to do next is to try it on. Unfortunately, the size isn’t great, I managed to squeeze into it but it was definitely too small for me. The market seller had a different opinion;

“Great size, perfect size!”

Despite my protests he insisted that I was wrong and nothing would persuade him otherwise. I started to try and explain my reasons but he was not having it, and we had to run out of the shop with the shopkeeper shouting down the road at me “Perfect size!!” A few days later I also realized I needed another bra, in which a similar situation occurred, and the man in the shop was insistent that any and all of the bras in his selection would fit me. Its strange how more Indian men know my size than I do myself.

Flower market in Jaipur

Anyway, so we carried on walking through the marketplace, getting hassled from every market stall we walk past, until somebody quietly asked “Excuse me, but can you tell me why tourists don’t want to speak to Indian people?” I turned around, feeling like it would be rude not to reply and thinking how nice it was not to be hassled into buying things. So we stopped to have a chat with this guy who said he was an accounting graduate who was spending a bit of time with his cousin working in one of the stalls. He assured us he did not want to sell us anything, he just wanted to sit down and have chai with us and have a chat. So we agreed, and conveniently the only place to sit was in his cousin’s stall. He brought us some chai and we talked for about half an hour, all the while thinking how nice it was not to feel like we had to buy something. Then the inevitable happened, and a selection of pashminas started getting laid out. And they did have a green one in the right shade and the right pattern, and it was soft. So their trick worked, and I bought the pashmina (although not without haggling them to under ¼ of the original price!). The guy who was basically our best friend at that point also told us as a gift he would arrange a rickshaw guide to take us around the city the day after, for only 400 rupees. I still have no idea if this was a good price or not, but we agreed to it anyway.  There was one final attempt of dressing me in a sari just because they wanted a picture of me in a sari, which was conveniently very expensive, but when this didn’t work we said our goodbyes and continued walking.

Trying to sell us the beautiful sari and hat combo

Not even 5 minutes later we were stopped by 2 guys in a rickshaw who asked us “Why do tourists not want to speak to Indian people?” Here we go again…. Although we are too polite and English to ignore it, so we get dragged in again. This time, the guy just wanted us to sit in his rickshaw and he bought us chai and we managed to get away with not buying anything off of him. He did have the loudest laugh and the most violent hi fives though, which were both used every 10 seconds, so we left with sore hands and ears. Having escaped the second guy, we walked further down the street and while buying ice cream, was approached a third time. This guy was older and didn’t initially seem like he had anything to sell, but told us he was a puppeteer and wanted to show us pictures of his shows, which were conveniently in his shop. We were then subjected to an albums worth of photos, most of which were him in Goa, and then he wanted to show us how his puppets worked and play us some music. We made a few attempts to leave but he didn’t stop talking, and again being English and far too polite, we did not feel we could go. We insisted we did not want to buy any puppets, and he accepted this, but wanted us to have miniature elephant souvenirs in exchange for something we had on us, or for us to buy him a beer. We told him we didn’t want to do this, and he started getting angry, so we made our quick exit and got into the first rickshaw we could find in case he started chasing us. We got back to the hotel feeling pretty bewildered, and unsure how we were going to dodge the people trying to sell us things when they all seemed so friendly and we are so bad at being rude.

Puppet skills

The next day, as arranged, we had a rickshaw waiting outside our hotel for us to take us to the sights around Jaipur. So we set off in his rickshaw which had a pretty interesting selection of music which the driver played at full volume. It started off with some hindi music, then moved onto techno, and then some power ballads, including cher and the backstreet boys. It felt like being in Luke’s car when he drives around Ashtead with the windows down playing magic fm radio. First off, Amber Fort. This is one of the most famous forts in Rajasthan, and although we are not fanatics of old buildings and architecture, it was very pretty with some nice views and had a maze of corridors to wander around inside.

 After this, we were taken to the water palace. Well, I say taken there, we were taken to a roadside to take pictures of it, and it was classed as an attraction. He also took us to an ‘elephant village’ which basically was an area of dusty land where they were keeping a few elephants for tourists to have elephant rides and other elephant based activities for a fee. I wasn't too keen on the setup, so we left pretty quickly. Finally we were taken to a temple, known as the monkey temple. Unfortunately for some unknown reason the rickshaw driver we had hired for the day had to leave, so we were dropped off there and assured we could get a cheap rickshaw back. The monkey temple was at the top of a hill and although we saw a few monkeys on our walk up to the temple, there were not many and there was no monkeys in the temple itself. The temple was nothing that amazing but it did have a great view of the city, so we left our shoes at the entrance of the temple and sat on a bench and looked at the view for a while. Some twenty calm minutes passed, when suddenly a little Indian girl ran up to us and exclaimed “shoe monkey up!” we followed her to the temple entrance and realized one of my sandals had been stolen by one of the monkeys. I stood there helplessly while Jonno and a small boy went to rescue it, and five minutes later came back successful. Crisis averted. We started wandering back down the hill and spotted quite a few monkeys, and were so entertained by them we ended up sitting on a wall watching them. Some of them came and sat pretty much next to us, they didn't seem bothered by us. We watched them running up and down trees, grooming each other, and stealing washing from the washing lines. When two dogs started growling at each other, one of the monkeys got excited by the prospect of a fight and ran up to a tree, shaking the branches excitedly. Then another tried to do the same but didn't have the same strength so barely got the branches to move, so skulked away sheepishly. Anyway, we watched the monkeys for a few hours and then noticed a car driving up and the monkeys gathering around it. A woman got out of the car with a mass of bananas, and started distributing them around. This made the monkeys very excited, and a few fights broke out. The car left, but the monkeys were now hyped up on bananas and were looking for trouble. One of them snuck up behind me, looking up at me, which I thought was sweet until it reached up and grabbed one of my earrings from my ear, luckily one that came out easily, and ran off with it. Another one tried to grab my bag from me, and the only reaction I could think of was to tell it off like a naughty child. In response to this, it hissed at me so we took it as our cue to leave. Somewhere around the temple there is now a monkey wearing one earring feeling very pleased with itself.

As we had been abandoned by our rickshaw driver we went in search of a rickshaw to take us back to the hotel. We managed to find one who agreed to take us there, only to take us to the marketplace and refused to take us any further unless we paid him three times the price. We refused, and got out of the rickshaw without paying him anything, which he didn't seem too bothered about, in search for another rickshaw.

The next day was the day before the Holi festival, and we had heard that there may be an event being put on for tourists in preparation. Somebody had told us it was being held at the polo grounds, so when a rickshaw driver approached us and we asked if anything was happening at the polo grounds, he said “yes, yes” and told us he could take us there. After a short ride in the rickshaw, he pulled up next to some big gates and gestured for us to get out. It looked pretty empty, so we asked what event was happening here. He replied “all the tourist stuff” and then sped away. We had a brief look around, but the place was deserted. Obviously the ‘tourist stuff’ wasn't here. We started walking back towards the town, which was a lot further than we thought. After about 45 minutes of walking, we managed to hail a rickshaw and asked him if there was any events happening that day. He took us to another venue, which had a poster for an event taking place the day after, on actual Holi, and looked at us expectantly. So there seemed to be no event happening. We headed towards the old town to explore there, where they were building a bonfire and had music playing, but not much action still. We walked further and came across a temple, where there was a crowd of people chanting, singing and playing the drums, which we decided to join. The group of people leading the celebrations were old men, but they were prancing about like they were thirty years younger, some of whom were already covered in coloured powder. On our walk back towards the town, the bonfire had been lit and people were dancing around it. It seemed like the celebrations had begun, and we were looking forward to the next day of more of the same.

Getting a Holi bonfire ready

View of Jaipur