Happy Diwali! We are now waiting for puja to start here in Orchha.
I can smell the curry wafting in the air!
In the meantime, can you guess where this picture was taken - ?
Wednesday, October 26, 2011
Sunday, October 23, 2011
Gwalior
We were joined on our trip to Gwalior by Olivier and Laurianne, whom we met in Fatehpur Sikri.
We took a bus back to Agra and got chance passenger tickets, which were really cheap but also meant we didn't have sure seats.
We went up adn down the sleeper section looking for a free place to sit, but the only available seats were in the AC section. So we tried our luck staying there until the conductor asked for our tickets. He said we could stay if we added 300 Rs. Of course, we didn't have the money, so he said "how much can you give?" Assessing our financial situation, I said try 50 Rs... for some strange reason, that didn't work so we ended up on the only free spot we could find - the exit.
But it was fun because we could poke our faces out of the train. Don't tell my mom!
Gwalior was a welcome change from all the other places we had visited. Rickshaw drivers would offer their services, and if you refuse they would say "okay, no problem." Had we just died and gone ot heaven?
We found some nice places to eat also, like the ice cream parlor, Baba's, and my personal favorite in Gwalior, the Indian Coffee House.
The cafe is run by the Indian coffee growers' cooperative, and their coffee was the best Henri and I have had in India. It's also clean, air conditioned, fairly-priced, and the people who frequent it were mostly middle-class Indians.
Another reason to go is the cool uniforms of the waiters :)
We stayed near the train station and it was really noisy all day, with drivers honking their horns unnecessarily and trucks revving their engines and swerving away from cows without slowing down... but what drove Henri crazy was the tiny mouse that showed up on our first night. He chased the mouse out and duct taped the door.
It was surprisingly effective -- but we did not expect the ants going over the door to eat our bananas. Dang!
The oldest monument in the complex is the Teli Ka Mandir, an erotic temple that was turned into a coffee shop by the British... WTF, right? Here, newlyweds were supposed to spend 3 nights after the wedding to learn about the art of making love.
Just in front is the Jain temple, where we were given orange headscarves and barefooted, we entered the temple. After praying, we were invited behind the temple to eat free thali, and we had the perhaps the best masala chai ever... and not because it was free!
It is hard to pick a favorite spot amongst the royal monuments, but the most impressive sight was the cliff of gigantic Buddha statues, the biggest being 17 meters or 55 ft tall, carved directly onto the rock. One could only imagine what an awe-inspiring sight that must have been for people entering the fort from the west gate.
If you plan to visit the fort, go through the east entrance first to avoid the crowd, tricksters and annoying guides. I saw a sign that said there's a 20 Rs entrance fee at the west gate, but that's totally bogus. Entering from the east also gives you the most scenic view. Some tourists with guides only pointed at the east exit but did not encourage their charges to explore what was below. And what a sight they missed!
We took a bus back to Agra and got chance passenger tickets, which were really cheap but also meant we didn't have sure seats.
We went up adn down the sleeper section looking for a free place to sit, but the only available seats were in the AC section. So we tried our luck staying there until the conductor asked for our tickets. He said we could stay if we added 300 Rs. Of course, we didn't have the money, so he said "how much can you give?" Assessing our financial situation, I said try 50 Rs... for some strange reason, that didn't work so we ended up on the only free spot we could find - the exit.
But it was fun because we could poke our faces out of the train. Don't tell my mom!
Gwalior was a welcome change from all the other places we had visited. Rickshaw drivers would offer their services, and if you refuse they would say "okay, no problem." Had we just died and gone ot heaven?
We found some nice places to eat also, like the ice cream parlor, Baba's, and my personal favorite in Gwalior, the Indian Coffee House.
The cafe is run by the Indian coffee growers' cooperative, and their coffee was the best Henri and I have had in India. It's also clean, air conditioned, fairly-priced, and the people who frequent it were mostly middle-class Indians.
Another reason to go is the cool uniforms of the waiters :)
We stayed near the train station and it was really noisy all day, with drivers honking their horns unnecessarily and trucks revving their engines and swerving away from cows without slowing down... but what drove Henri crazy was the tiny mouse that showed up on our first night. He chased the mouse out and duct taped the door.
It was surprisingly effective -- but we did not expect the ants going over the door to eat our bananas. Dang!
Aside from the coffee and relative calm of the atmosphere, the highlight for this stop is the imposing Gwalior Fort, and the stunningly beautiful (albeit a little bizaare) palace nestled within its walls. It had a whitening pool where the queens bathed in saffron water, a mirrored ballroom where dancers with sparkly dresses would reflect the light from the oil lamps and bounce them off gem-encrusted walls like human mirror balls, it had an ancient system of air cooling and telephoning, and the alarm clock was something straight out of the Flintstones; it must have been a wonderful time to be alive.
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| BAD! |
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| GOOD! |
The story of the Maharajah of Gwalior in the time of the Mughal occupation is both romantic and tragic. When the Muslim Mughals arrived, defacing their beautiful statues and temples, the women burned themselves to death to avoid capture and the desecration of their dead bodies. The royals who were caught alive were kept in the palace, whose pleasure rooms were turned into torture rooms and dungeons.
Some Indian tourists asked for a picture with Henri, and gave him a bag of water in exchange. Yun lang ang TF? (That's all?) Hahaha.
The oldest monument in the complex is the Teli Ka Mandir, an erotic temple that was turned into a coffee shop by the British... WTF, right? Here, newlyweds were supposed to spend 3 nights after the wedding to learn about the art of making love.
Just in front is the Jain temple, where we were given orange headscarves and barefooted, we entered the temple. After praying, we were invited behind the temple to eat free thali, and we had the perhaps the best masala chai ever... and not because it was free!
It is hard to pick a favorite spot amongst the royal monuments, but the most impressive sight was the cliff of gigantic Buddha statues, the biggest being 17 meters or 55 ft tall, carved directly onto the rock. One could only imagine what an awe-inspiring sight that must have been for people entering the fort from the west gate.
If you plan to visit the fort, go through the east entrance first to avoid the crowd, tricksters and annoying guides. I saw a sign that said there's a 20 Rs entrance fee at the west gate, but that's totally bogus. Entering from the east also gives you the most scenic view. Some tourists with guides only pointed at the east exit but did not encourage their charges to explore what was below. And what a sight they missed!
Keeping the Faith in Fatehpur Sikri
We woke up early to catch the sunrise at the rooftop, just above our room, our last look at the Taj before we move on to the next stage of the trip: Fatehpur Sikri. We had coffee and Speculoos, my last «meal» of the day because I was going to do the Hindu fast for my husband's long life.
The bus to Fathepur Sikri leaves every thirty minutes and we took the one leaving at eleven, which arrived at twelve noon. We had an idea of where to stay but when we got out of the bus, a young man told us he had a nice place with a great sunset view and we ended up following him without really knowing where he was taking us. It was just the start of a day full of following people without really knowing where we were going.
We followed him through narrow, winding streets and steep stairs dotted with goat droppings, an ancient holy pool that had turned neon green by decades of pollution,
an alley full of drying cow dung patties and a desolate mountain of trash...
it was one scary, smelly place after another, but the young man said he promised in French then in English that the place was going to be worth it. There were a bunch of French and Czech people there already, and they came on the recommendation of Guide du Routard. It did actually turn out to be quite a nice place to stay in, with a view that was straight out of a postcard from Africa. We got the bedroom with a sunset view and an improvised local version of an air conditioner.
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| (where kids love to take a dip) |
it was one scary, smelly place after another, but the young man said he promised in French then in English that the place was going to be worth it. There were a bunch of French and Czech people there already, and they came on the recommendation of Guide du Routard. It did actually turn out to be quite a nice place to stay in, with a view that was straight out of a postcard from Africa. We got the bedroom with a sunset view and an improvised local version of an air conditioner.
After settling for a price for the room, we followed the other French couples in the hotel to the market, to a small eatery of questionable standards for cleanliness. I felt a little relieved that I was fasting and I wasn't so hungry. Henri then announced that he was going to fast for my long life right then. Laurianne said she can drink the water without getting bowel problems since she tried drinking the tap water in Thailand. Her last feat was to drink water from the Ganges. What bravery! But I was just recovering from Agra and I didn't have the heart or the intestinal strength.
After lunch, we wandered around in the market with Melanie and Jerome until we got to the mosque, which was just next to our guest house. Inside, there were a lot of children selling postcards, asking for used entrance tickets to the palace, asking for pens or candies or money or chocolate. A man approached us and, shooing the children away, said he worked for the mosque and he will guide us around for free. He explained, in heavily accented French, what this and that wall was, told us to stand in certain spots for the best pictures, and led us through the maze of tombs going to the marble mausoleum of the sufi saint where people tie a pice of yarn in the marble and make a wish.
They were so proud that Carla Bruni got pregnant after making a wish in the tomb that they wished we would have babies too. Henri had felt that he was a good guide and wanted to give him some money before we left, since he said he was doing this for free.
At the end of the tour, he led us to a corner of the mosque where he sold us finely sculpted figurines at overly bloated prices. It was weird to find their little store hiding here, inside a mosque of all places, but Henri felt he deserved something so he bought a little thing. Later, we would find out that it was five times less than the bargained-down price Henri got, and talking with the local people would reveal a character of Fatehpur Sikri that is too sad to ignore. But this story would come later.
When we got out of the mosque, Mr. Rahis, a man with light green eyes and a proclivity to speak in proverbs, asked us to follow him. For some reason, we had lost the others at this point (Laurianne, Olivier, Mel and Jerome were getting ice cream) and Rahis wouldn't wait so we followed him to the back of the mosque, an abandoned place with a single white tomb in the center of the square. It was a welcome break from our struggle to be left alone outside, and it was lovely with the sun beginning to burn red.
We were rejoined with Mel and Jerome on our way back to the guest house. We were looking forward to watching the sunset from the superb view on our terrace, but a man with a green turban and a cane intercepted us. He wanted us to follow him somewhere and we seemed to have no choice. He doesn't speak a word of English so I didn't understand where we were going; but he was so insistent that we ended up following him through a rocky and disintegrating 70° path down the cliff – which seemed to be no problem for him. Henri said we should try to walk «comme un canard» or like a duck so it would be easy for us too... and upon reflection, he did walk like a duck; or a green penguin.
The man turned out to be Baba (father), a well-loved eccentric who guards a tomb in the field below. He lives on the generosity of others, and his daily routine goes something like this: chapati, banana, chai, shilom (pipe), pray, sleep. He brought us to the tomb and tried to explain this to us in charades, Henri got it better than the rest of us so he became kind of the interpreter.
Baba invited us to his tent and proceeded to make chai... but in the middle of boiling the water, the muslim prayer started and he ran to get a bottle of oil and a handful of cotton from a corner of the tent, then ran to the tomb, took his turban off to reveal his long, flaming red hair, and started praying, pouring oil on the tomb.
Here we were, at sunset, watching a man absorbed in his prayers, the fire burning brightly under a tree, the growing darkness embracing the wide, flat expanse of farm land around us. If in the beginning I felt we were walking into a movie, by this time I felt we had walked into an entirely new world.
We went back up hours later, with Baba this time, and Aslam, the owner of the guest house, was so happy that he opened a bottle of rum and we had a party.
The following days were full of exploration, from unguarded ruins to discoveries about the human condition. It was a beautiful place, with wickedness bubbling just beneath the surface. It's a place where everyone wants to be your friend, but only one percent might actually really want to be. But we met some people, travellers like us, who ended up actually being true friends.
These are some pictures from the next three days:
A virus got our computers and hard drives, this was a serious moment of struggle!
Most of the guests had left on our last night at the guest house, Aslam broke out the rum once again to bid us farewell. Although we were a little suspicious of him at the beginning, we found him to be a complicated but still a very nice guy. Before we left, he gave us 2 girls tiger eye necklaces, a gift that will remind me of the good and bad times in Fatehpur Sikri. And I think, in the end, we became friends with someone we didn't really intend to like in the first place.