More India

Holy cats, it's November! How did that happen?
Great art needs no season to be relevant, but do yourself a favor- don't let this month pass by without listening to this. It's another Patrice Wilson classic.

It's NOVEMBER also means that it's been 8 months since Thailand and India. 8 months and I still haven't finished writing about it on here. That bums me out, because as I've said before, Udaipur and Varanasi were my two favorite stops in India. As much as I enjoy writing longish entries about each place, including what I ate, how I felt, etc, obviously I will never finish writing about this trip if I try to do that. I accept failure. Time to water it down and get this done before my next trip...which at this point is nothing more than fantasizing, but gah, so many places I want to go.

Udaipur continued
Day 2 was beautifully sunny and uncomfortably warm. We sweated our way through the City Palace, then we took a boat ride on Lake Pichola (which was in a Huffington Post/Fodors article last week about the most beautiful lakes in the world). It was gorgeous. The boat dropped us at a hotel on one of the islands in the lake. I tried to beat the heat with some ice cream. Since Anya likes to live dangerously, she got some tea...WITH ICE IN IT. It had been weeks since I'd enjoyed a beverage with ice. It was oh so hot that day, and that ice was a mouth watering thing of beauty. But my innocence was lost in 2011. I will never escape the memory of my bout of Thai-del wave. I'd gone to bed about 10, my midsection making a few gurgling noises. I woke up about midnight with an IED in my stomach. The rest of the night was split between laying in the fetal position trying to ease the cramps, and running to the bathroom. Following my night of no sleep was a miserable 24+ hour long journey back to Seoul via the back of a pick up truck that in Thailand is called a "taxi", a 2 hour ferry ride, an 8 hour bus ride, a taxi to the airport, a 4 hour layover, a 5 hour redeye flight to Shanghai, a 7 hour layover, a 2 hour flight to Seoul, and an hour train ride back into the city, all while feeling like I was dying, and then not going to the bathroom for the next week because whatever dodgy Thai medicine the pharmacist had given me stopped me up real good. (Not) Sorry for the overshare. I am sorry for the repeat information though, as I'm sure I've written about that before. It was one of those life changing events. I learned that when Lonely Planet says avoid ice and don't brush your teeth with the tap water, they are serious. Since everything in India seems way more intense than Thailand, I had no desire to experience Thai-del wave's Indian counterpart, Delhi belly. So I skipped the ice, and if memory serves, Anya suffered no ill effects from it. That night for dinner we ate at a restaurant just up the street from our hotel. So so SO good. Indian food, sigh, yum. While we were there we met an American couple, who'd quit their jobs and were spending as much time as they could traveling around Asia and Africa, until their savings ran out. People are so cool.

Old school Indian cookware at the City Palace

A rickshaw collection at City Palace

A boat on Pichola Lake, not the one we took though. Ours had way less character than this

My thali from Lotus Cafe. Yeah, be jealous. I'd trade my first born for some of this right now. 

For our third day in Udaipur, we hired a taxi to take us to Kumbhalgarh Fort and the Jain Temple at Ranakpur. I could write multiple entries in here just about this day. It was probably one of the top 5 greatest days ever. There was absolutely stunningly beautiful scenery, delicious food at a strange roadside "buffet" restaurant, ridiculous and slightly scary roads lined with countless monkeys some of which were eating carrots, a tour of the temple courtesy of a Jain priest, or whatever a Jain man of the cloth is called, and another delicious dinner at the Lotus Cafe. 

The driver stopped in the middle of nowhere for us to take a picture. I think it was really so he could smoke a cigarette, but it was pretty. 

He also stopped in a tiny town and went to drink some chai. I kind of regret not getting out of the car at this stop, because when will I ever get the chance to poke around small town India again? But, I suppose there's not much I could have seen/done in the 10 minutes he was out of the car. 

Advice at Kumbhalgarh Fort

Kumbhalgarh Fort

There were some scary roads on the way to Ranakpur. 

Another overshare-this was not a problem for me at the time of my visit to the Jain temple. Though if it were, I probably would not have maintained the sanctity to the temple. When would I be there again? They also searched our bags at the door, to make sure we weren't bringing any leather into the temple.

the Jain temple at Ranakpur

Inside the temple

 We were headed on down the road after stopping for lunch at the aforementioned roadside restaurant, (which served food buffet style out of clay pots heated with hot coals under each one, so good!) when two young boys standing by the side of the road stopped our car. The said something to the driver, and he told us to get out of the car. I didn't understand what was happening, but I was sure it would involve me paying money to these boys. We walked a short ways, and I then understood. They were stopping people to come and see their ox powered water wheel.

They seemed pretty proud of their wheel, and there was something said about this being water for the whole village. But I remember at the time thinking "What village?" as we were once again in the middle of nowhere India. I also asked myself how much someone would pay me to take a drink of that water. I don't remember my answer, but I'm sure it included medical expenses. Before we got back into the car, the kids held out their hand. If memory serves, in addition to their "tip" we also gave them our water bottles. 

It was obvious these boys had very little, and I tried to remind myself of that. But I didn't like being given no choice in this matter. Our driver, whom we were paying, didn't ask us if we wanted to see this wheel. He told us to get out of the car. It was stuff like this that I found exhausting in India, and it happened daily. I was an ATM to them. There were restroom attendants, that I'm fairly certain were just beggars hanging out in there, demanding handouts from tourists just for using the facilities. Sigh. I'd been to other developing/high poverty level countries, but I'd never experienced anything close to this level of "you have to give me money just because" before. The only time I'd experienced anything close to this was in Morocco, when groups of kids would randomly start walking in front of us, "guiding" us through the medina, then demand money for their services.  

I was happy for the longish drive back to the city. I stared out the car window, and for the hundredth time on this trip, I pinched myself to make sure this was all real. 

My attempt to water things down failed. You can't water down India. Impossible. And because day 4 was so eventful, it gets its own entry, another time.

I need to say it again so everyone understands, I didn't dislike India at all. I feel like my blog entries about it seem kind of negative. But, I'm having a hard time putting into words what it was like. It was three weeks of complete sensory overload. The poverty was hard to see, and the nonstop begging and scamming were exhausting. But, if I ignore that, I'm leaving out a huge part of my experience there. Yet, despite that, I'd go back to India in a second if I were given the chance.