Kumbh Mela, Haridwar, Uttarakhand, India

The Hindu Kumbh Mela is the largest religious gathering in the world, attracting millions of pilgrims.  Devotees from all branches of Hinduism, including wandering Naga sadhus (naked spiritual men) gather for religious observances and to bathe in sacred river waters.  In 2010 the event is held at Haridwar, Uttarakhand, where the waters of the sacred Ganges River first emerge from the Himalayas onto the Indian plain.

As our time in India coincided with the 2010 Kumbh Mela, we decided to adjust our itinerary to be in in Haridwar on one of this year’s auspicious Ganges bathing dates, 30 March.  The railway station and town were packed with people and we struggled through the crowds to find an auto-rickshaw to take us to our hotel.  This was a hot, tiring job – for once the demand-supply equation was very much in favour of the auto-rickshaw wallahs.

We spent most of our time in the vicinity of the Har-Ki-Pairi Ghat on the edge of the Ganges canal that flows fast through the town.  Mesh barriers have been installed to prevent pilgrims being swept away.  There was a short riverside religious service at sunset – the atmosphere was electric with tens of thousands of people caught up in the excitement of the moment.  Small baskets of flowers illuminated with candles were then released onto the Ganges.  Lee Tuan released one, hoping it might reach Calcutta several hundred kilometres downstream.  But a nearby woman emerging from the Ganges shook her hair and the water extinguished the candle and sank the basket, barely a metre from its launching point.  An appropriate metaphor for the lottery of life we thought.  There were only a few ash-smeared Naga sadhus around – their big day is in mid April.  There was nothing tacky or sleazy in their clotheless ambulations; even so it was a novel experience to encounter totally naked men on the road.

On Monday we travelled north of Haridwar to Rishikesh, self-proclaimed yoga capital of the world.  It was here where the Beatles came in the late 60s to spend time with the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi and to write the music for their White Album.  We ourselves came to Rishikesh seeking not spiritual enlightenment, but roast chicken.  Being a holy city, Haridwar is strictly a no meat, no alcohol place.  We were hankering for some chicken and our guidebook referred to a cafe in Rishikesh that served it.  In the event we never found it, making do instead with a filling eggplant pizza that we ate while overlooking the Ganges sweeping around into view from the steeply-rising hills to the north.

The return transport to Haridwar was at a premium, and seated passengers were required to have others sit on their lap.  We were fortunate to have a seat and made our laps available to a pleasant older Rajasthani man.  When it came time to leave Haridwar, it was a real trial getting back to the main railway station.  The town had been sectioned off and the through roads closed.  We ended up catching a train from Haridwar to Haridwar, ie from a station on one side of town to the other.  It took nearly three hours to cover the five kilometres but we made it to the main station in time to catch our next overnight train, this one west to the land of the Sikhs, Punjab.

Old Delhi / New Delhi, India

We saw little of Delhi in our first two days here as we were indisposed with stomach upsets, the first in two months in India.  But as soon as the diarrhoea abated, we dosed ourselves with Gastro Stop and gingerly headed out into the heat.  Old Delhi was a shrill melee of people, bikes and vehicles swarming along grimy, dusty, smelly streets and side alleys.  But everything’s relative and we found the occasional head-jerking jolt of stale urine preferable to the pervasive sickly sulphurous air of Agra.

The fruits for sale in the Central Bazaar were fresh and excellent and we later returned to our room at Express 66 with grapes, oranges, mangoes and lemons that all helped in our rehydration.  Lee Tuan carries in her pack a small plastic orange juicer that’s worth its weight in saffron.  All over India we’ve had freshly squeezed orange juice every morning and refreshing lemon sodas in the afternoon, the latter simply made from the juice of a lemon or lime with added soda water.  The perfect drink for a hot day.  The locals add sugar and/or salt but we prefer it plain.

We took auto-rickshaws to see some of the sights around town.  Having had our fill of forts and mosques in recent weeks, we zoomed past the imposing early 17th century sandstone Red Fort and Jama Masjid, and stopped for an hour at the National Gandhi Museum, a tribute to the life of the Father of India, Mahatma Gandhi.  Mahatma was a small man in physical stature but a moral giant.

We visited the world heritage listed Tomb of Humayun, son of Babur, the first Mughal Emperor of India and descendant of Genghis Khan.  Our guide book describes this tomb, the first example of Persian influence in Indian architecture, as the most sublime sight in Delhi.  Whether or not this is true we cannot say, but it is certainly much less sublime than the Taj Mahal and “Baby Taj” in Agra, both later refinements of the Humayun architectural style.

We ended our sightseeing in Connaught Place in the New Delhi city centre where we stumbled upon a western-style bakery stocked with Danishes, cookies and classy chocolates.  Still a little weak from the stomach upset, these seemed exactly the sort of nourishments one should be having to replenish vital energy reserves.   So we chose a selection, perhaps wider than was strictly necessary, and returned to Express 66 to pack our bags for tomorrow morning’s dawn train departure north, to see the largest religious gathering in the world.

Agra, Uttar Pradesh, India

Agra in Uttar Pradesh is a polluted city with an unreliable electricity supply system.  But visitors still flock to the city in their hundreds of thousands every year, for Agra has several fabulous tourist sights, the legacy of the Mughal Empire centred here in the 16th and 17th centuries.

“A teardrop on the cheek of eternity” was how one besotted visitor described Agra’s No. 1 tourist drawcard, the Taj Mahal.  Many others have simply claimed it to be the most beautiful building in the world.  The Taj was built by Shah Jahan as a memorial to his second wife Mumtaz Mahal who died giving birth to their 14th child, and was completed in 1653.  The 20,000 builders and artisans who toiled on the project set up home immediately south of the mausoleum, creating the congested maze of alleyways known as Taj Ganj, now a popular backpacker haunt.

We stayed at the Kamal Hotel in Taj Ganj and dined just the once in their rooftop restaurant, the strangely named Stuff Makers.  As it turned out though, it was a fairly accurate description of what’s served up here.  Several of the small hotels in the surrounding alleyways also have incredible views of the Taj Mahal from their rooftop cafes, and are packed with visitors at sunset.

We were at the south entrance of the Taj before sunrise on Sunday, hoping to beat the hordes of visitors who would come later.  The air looked romantically misty, but this was due to air pollution, not water vapour.  Along with a few hundred others we admired the edifice from a distance before going inside the mausoleum itself.  It’s certainly a very beautiful, elegant building that lives up to all the hype.  Something we hadn’t thought about or expected, though, was just how close the Taj is to the surrounding ramshackle buildings that are anything but beautiful or elegant.  The Taj is a swan pressed up against ugly ducklings.

Sadly for Shah Jahan, the Taj Mahal had been completed for only a short time before he was overthrown by his treacherous son and imprisoned in nearby Agra Fort where he died eight years later.  His body was then moved to the Taj, next to his late wife.

We had a look around the huge Agra Fort and the very beautiful “Little Taj”, the mausoleum of a Persian nobleman who held a senior position in the Mughal government of the time, and who was the grandfather of the woman in whose memory the Taj Mahal was built.  On Monday we hired a taxi to take us to the abandoned fortified city of Fatehpur Sikri about an hour to the west.  This was built in the late 1500s and was intended to be the new capital of the Mughal Empire.  But severe water supply problems caused it to be abandoned after a few years.  The buildings and courtyards are massive and still in very good condition, and to wander through and around them is an atmospheric experience.

Three nights in Agra were enough for us.  We’d seen the main sights, and the stifling heat and slightly nauseating sulphurous air pollution were getting to us.  And the dozen or more electricity supply breakdowns daily were becoming very irritating.  So we boarded a dawn train and headed for Delhi.

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Jaisalmer & Jaipur, Rajasthan, India

Jaisalmer in the far west of Rajasthan was established in 1156 on the camel train routes between India and central Asia.  The city accumulated great wealth, the legacy of which can still be seen today in the few remaining haveli (mansions) built by successful merchants, carved from sandstone and wood.

But otherwise, modern-day Jaisalmer retains little of its former wealth and opulence.  Its streets are dirty, covered with baked-on cow manure, grime and litter.  Like the other sizeable Rajasthani cities, Jaisalmer was originally located within the walls of an impressive fort containing the Maharaja’s palace.  And Jaisalmer’s golden sandcastle-like stone fort is certainly impressive.  It’s also perhaps the world’s only existing living fort, with more than a thousand people residing inside, these days catering mainly to the tourist trade.

We came to Jaisalmer on an overnight train from Jodhpur and poked our noses out when the desert heat wasn’t too fierce to inspect the Fort and the former palace and Jain temples within.  We took an auto-rickshaw to see a few of the city’s haveli and to admire their magnificent, intricately-carved facades.  Late Wednesday afternoon we shared a car with a German visitor and his guide to the village of Sam in the Great Thar Desert about 40 km from Jaisalmer.  Manfred first came to India 31 years ago, fell in love with the country, and has returned every year since for several weeks during the German winter.  At Sam we hired camels and headed out over the dunes towards Pakistan not far over the horizon.  But we got only as far as the sunset before turning our ships of the desert and retracing our steps back to Jaisalmer.

On Thursday we took an overnight train to Jaipur, Rajasthan’s capital.  Compared with the other Rajasthani cities we’d seen, Jaipur seemed to have little to recommend it.  But we did take an early morning auto-rickshaw to see the imposing Amber Fort about 13 km out of town.  By now we’d had our fill of forts and Maharajas’ palaces, and with some different sights in mind, we boarded an afternoon bus on Saturday, eventually leaving colourful Rajasthan behind us.

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Jodhpur, Rajasthan, India

The blue, western Rajasthani city of Jodhpur (yes, the birthplace of jodhpurs), is presided over by the astonishing 16th century Mehrangarh Fort.  Still run by the descendants of the Maharaja of Jodhpur, the soaring Fort and palaces within it are now an awe-inspiring world-class museum.

In its heyday the rulers put beauty on an equal footing with functionality, clearly evident in the architecture, furniture and equipment throughout the massive complex.  But it wasn’t all about sweetness and aesthetics back then – far from it.  When the perceived need arose, the former Maharajas and their clans were capable of great courage, and viciousness too.  Surrender wasn’t considered an option and when defeat and death in battle were inevitable, the wives and daughters would suicide on a funeral pyre then await their men in paradise.  Next morning the men would charge out on their steeds to face certain death, taking as many of the enemy as possible with them.  (But wouldn’t it be a real bummer if they awoke in the morning to discover that the enemy had made a surprise retreat overnight? - presumably this never happened though.)

We spent a few hours in fantastic Mehrangarh admiring the building and contents, and great views over the city.  Along with the fascinating and beautiful palace exhibits there was a large weapon collection, including a nasty looking knife/scissor thing that the audio guide said would spring open when plunged into an enemy, “shredding the innards”.  A nearby signboard stated that “Maharaja Man Singh once organized a shikaar (hunting party) near Nagaur.  A tent was set up, and a durrie spread out.  His guests were invited to sit and dine with him.  Little did they know that underneath the durrie, gunpowder had been laid.  After some time Maharaja Man Singh got up and withdrew.  This was the signal to ignite the gunpowder, and the durrie was blown up, killing all the guests whom the Maharaja regarded as a personal threat.”  Hmmm.  The new ideas we’ve picked up for entertaining guests aren’t confined to the recipes Lee Tuan learned at her Indian cooking class in Cochin.  Dinner anyone?

We also spent some time strolling around the nearby Jaswant Thada, a domed marble memorial to Maharaja Jaswant Singh II, and caught an auto-rickshaw out of town to the Umaid Bhawan Palace, now largely a luxury hotel.  This huge edifice was begun as a job-creation project during a prolonged drought.  3,000 workers toiled for 15 years to complete it.

All this sightseeing required fuelling by great Indian food which we enjoyed on the roof-top terrace of the Krishna Prakash Haveli Hotel in the shadows of the Mehrangarh walls towering ominously above.  But we checked under the durrie before the waiter came to take our order.

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Ranakpur & Kumbalgarh, Rajasthan, India

About 90 km north of Udaipur are the small towns of Ranakpur and Kumbalgarh, each with a fabulous visitor attraction.  Towering over Kumbalgarh at 4,000 feet in the Aravalli Hills is the giant stone fort built by Maharana Kumba in the early 1400s.  It was only ever taken by an enemy once in its history, and then only for two days.  The fort walls stretch for 36 km and enclose 360 temples and 700 cannon bunkers.  We climbed in the fierce heat to the top of the fort, a forbidding wind-swept place, and looked out over the equally forbidding parched countryside.

The nearby town of Ranakpur has an incredible Jain temple, also built in the early 1400s.  We’ve seen many temples before on our travels but never one more beautiful than this.  Carved entirely from milky white marble, the temple has 29 halls supported by 1,444 pillars, each unique.  The roofs, walls and pillars are all adorned with intricate, exquisite marble sculptures and carvings.

Along the way we stopped to inspect a simple, ingenious method used to raise water from wells to the surface.  A team of two bullocks directed by a man sitting behind walked continuously in a circle, turning a horizontal metal wheel which drove a vertical conveyor of buckets that scooped water from below and delivered it to a sluice at ground level.  We passed several of these contraptions during the day, and also roadside village wells where women filled large metal containers with water and put them on their heads for the long, hot walk home.  Our own journey was much easier.  We had hired a car with driver to take us from Udaipur to Jodhpur via Ranakpur and Kumbalgarh.  We set off from Udaipur at 8.30 am and reached Jodhpur as the sun was setting on another baking hot Rajasthani day.

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Udaipur, Rajasthan, India

Udaipur in Rajasthan is widely claimed to be India’s most romantic city.  It surely looks romantic with its elegant, ornately turreted buildings, and fairytale palaces and hotels seemingly floating on the glassy calm waters of Lake Pichola.  

Our stay here proved to be a cultural as well as sightseeing experience.  On Thursday night at the Bagore-Ki-Haveli we attended an authentic Rajasthani dance performance along with Rajasthani puppetry.  To my surprise, the latter was excellent and the whole show was great.  The following night we continued to indulge in fine culture, attending a guesthouse roof-top screening of James Bond’s Octopussy. 

Now I know what you’re thinking – Agent 007 and Rajasthani folk dancers make unlikely bedfellows indeed.  But surprisingly, there is a close link.  Udaipur itself, for Octopussy was filmed here, utilizing the magnificent palaces, local auto-rickshaws souped up to enable them to do wheel stands as they roared around the narrow, winding alleyways, and the brooding mountain-top Monsoon Palace across the valley to the west.  Octopussy turned out to be a very silly show, one of the worst Bond movies, but it was fun picking out the local Udaipur landmarks and seeing auto-rickshaws move as we’ve never seen them move before (and dreading the thought of ever being in one moving like that).  Nearly every guesthouse screens Octopussy – every night!    

We took a boat ride on Lake Pichola to see up close the mirage-like luxury Lake Palace Hotel, originally the 18th century home of Maharaja Jagat Singh II.  Further down the lake, on Jagmandir Island, is another former Palace, this one now used as a function centre and tourist boat stop-over point.  Returning to shore we inspected the soaring City Palace, Rajasthan’s largest, and former home to 22 Maharajas over the centuries, but now a labyrinthine museum.  Our day ended with dinner at the Whistling Teal, the first restaurant we’ve ever seen with a large cattle grate at the entrance to prevent unwelcome bovines wandering in.  We scampered across, chose a candle-lit table overlooking the lush courtyard lawn, and after studying the menu we ordered the Murg Masala, Rajasthani Dahl and Palak Ki Sabzi.         

Udaipur, Rajasthan.  What a great place.

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