“Go
and have a look at your sink!”
Mum
has been in Delhi less than 12 hours and she emerges from the kitchen
brandishing a wire brillo pad and triumphantly declaring that she has cleaned
the “uncleanable,” I had told her, sink. (I’m very grateful by the way mum and
still marvelling at its metallic shine!)
Feeling
guilty and slightly peeved after my previous day’s cleaning spree that mum had
still managed to identify the grimiest item in my flat, at least I’d planned us
out a travelling schedule for the next couple of weeks to ensure she’d be
seeing more of India than just the inside of my kitchen sink. Our plan was to
spend the first week travelling round part of Rajasthan stopping in Agra,
Fatehpur Sikri, Jaipur and finishing up in Udaipur. The second week we’d
planned to go up to Shimla for a few days to do some mountain view gazing and
walking.
Before
I go any further family as I know a few of you had your concerns about what condition I would return mum in, don’t be alarmed as you read this as, apart from a few
hairy moments with aggressive monkeys, a power cut whilst walking down a busy
highway and a brief night’s stay at the world’s worst hotel, the story ends
well. I’ve checked and mum has since reached home safely (she arrived in India
with a large supply of mint imperials, enough hand sanitiser to sanitise an
army and her own supply of plastic straws so we were always safe in the
knowledge that we’d never have bad breath or dirty hands throughout the two
weeks).
Everyone
has their own opinion of the Taj, my Keralan friend resolutely declares that
she’s seen “much more beautiful buildings in Kerala” (not that she’s bias), but
this was my second visit and I still found it just as beautiful. Even if giant
marble mausoleums encrusted with millions of jewels and carvings aren’t really
your thing, it’s difficult not to be impressed by this huge white beacon of a
building and admire the craftsmanship that went into its making. That said,
when mum and I visited the Fatehpur Sikri palace complex the following day I
think we were actually more taken by it in comparison. The palaces are perched high
up on a hill so that as you walk through, the courtyards and windows face out
onto the Agra countryside. The architecture is also a curious but beautiful, I
thought, mish-mash of Hindu, Muslim and Christian designs and strange Labyrinth
style buildings with staircases leading into nowhere. I’m not sure what brought
on our morbid fascination but, instructed by the guidebooks that one
of the palaces looks onto a public courtyard where they carried out public
elephant tramplings (the way to dispense with your thieves and murderers in
India before the days of prisons), we spent the end of our visit fixated on
finding this courtyard and triumphantly announcing, “there it is!” when we found
the ring where they tied up the elephants. It’s the small things.
In
Jaipur we visited a lot of palaces. The City Palace – several palaces that had
been merged into one big palace, Palace of the Winds and The Amber Fort – several
palaces contained within a giant fort. The Amber Fort was my favourite. Parts
of it were still being used as a home until the 70’s and still contained the same
furnishings, including one dubious room which had mirrored walls, floors and ceilings – Jen & Em, imagine Infernos nightclub minus the
sticky floors, rugby teams and terrible music. Overcome by so much sightseeing it
wasn’t long before we reverted to stereotype and sought out the nearest place to
our hotel serving alcohol, not as easy as we’d hoped and involved crossing many
dimly lit traffic intersections, being directed into a hotel that despite being
told it was ‘open’ was still under construction, until we finally found a rooftop bar drenched in slightly seedy red lighting but with an amazing view of the city lights.
Udaipur.
I loved everything about this city; waking up in the morning to the sound of
wet clothes being slapped and pounded on the ghat, watching the old man going
for his daily morning bath and lying on his back in the water in the lotus position,
walking through the windy streets next to our hotel past houses with cows sat
in the front room, watching the sun rise and set over the lake, and the Udaipur
sense of humour. I’m not used to sarcasm out here in the same way that it’s an
everyday occurrence at home so I was taken aback when I told the hotel manager
the electricity in our room wasn’t working and he responded in a deadpan voice,
“Yes, you did not pay me yesterday!” waiting just long enough for me to look
panic stricken before chuckling to himself and I realised he was joking and we
both laughed. That same day we went into a small shop selling silver pendants
and necklaces. The woman running the store obligingly got out various different
pendants from the glass case for us to look at including some that had moving
parts, an owl that flapped its wings, a walking dinosaur and so on. She then
passed me one which I couldn’t at first identify and then shrieked with
laughter when she saw my face as I realised what it was, a kama sutra pendant complete
with moving parts!
Sad
about leaving Udaipur behind but excited about the prospect of heading up to
the mountains, the start to the next chapter of our trip was like being prodded
with a sharp Indian stick and told, “You didn’t really think you could have it
that good for two whole weeks did you?” Arriving in Shimla in the darkness
because our taxi driver got repeatedly lost on the way (I knew it was bad news
when we’d stop for directions and he'd drive off before the person giving
instructions had finished what they were saying), we finally pulled up at our
hotel, the ironically named, ‘Hotel Dreamland.’ The less said about this place
the better as I’ve wreaked my revenge on tripadvisor.in but unless your idea of
a Dreamland is pillows coated in someone else’s human hair, a hotel manager
that looks at you as though he’d like to murder you in your sleep when you ask
for toilet roll and a drunk porter, then stay away. Still, no trip would be
complete without such small blips and thankfully that’s all it was. The next
day we arose at 6am, paid, sprinted out of the door and trekked the other side of
town to a new hotel and awoke to a bright new day.
Shimla
town, as people had warned me, isn’t much to speak of but it’s in a beautiful
location which looks out over the Himalayan mountain ranges and pine forests.
On our last day we decided to do the 5km walk to Chadwick Falls. I have a
strong suspicion that we are the first two people to have actually visited the
falls since they were first discovered in the early 1900’s and whoever wrote
the ‘5km’ sign at the start of the walk has a cruel sense of humour. One hour
of walking later we had walked at least 5km but didn’t seem to be nearing a waterfall. Two hours of walking later down steep mountain roads, still no
waterfall. Each time we stopped to ask someone if we were going in the right
direction for the falls they would nod and point downwards, so we went, down
and down until three hours later nearly at the valley floor we finally came across a sign post pointing
into the forest. We walked for another hour through the pine forest, two lone
trekkers, mum screaming every time she walked into a cobweb, me tripping over
pine cones and still no sign of a waterfall. We kept coming across spots where
there looked as though there should have been a waterfall but was just dry
rocks. The only thing that had driven us forward for four hours was the thought
of this tumbling 67m high, so says the Lonely Planet, waterfall and me
exclaiming with utter conviction, “Let’s keep going, I can definitely hear
water now!,” but never a drop of water was to be found. Crestfallen and thinking
about the four hour walk back up the mountainside we decided to turn back when
an amazing thing happened, nearly as amazing as finding the waterfall that we’d
trekked all that way to see except better. We emerged from the forest onto the
main road and heard the rumble of an engine around the corner. During the
entirety of our four hour (did I mention yet it was four hours?) walk down the
mountainside only a couple of motorbikes and cars had passed us the whole way.
To keep each other’s spirits up we had taken it in turns to say “Perhaps there
will be a bus that passes us on the way back?” but we knew our chances were slim
to none. So when, at the same split second that we emerged onto the road, this
bus suddenly emerged through the dust, we both started laughing hysterically, crazy
from exhaustion and heat. I waved and flapped my arms frantically to get the bus to stop and was too tired to consider how ridiculous I must have looked. The people on the
bus observed us with looks of amazement, I don’t suppose they get many
tourists on that part of the mountain trekking to the invisible waterfall,
and amusement at these two westerners covered from head to toe in dust and
grinning maniacally.
