I've been back from our 3 week trip up north to Rajasthan for about a week now, but I forgot to mention a few things prior to departure, so lemme fill you in a bit.
When I mentioned going to the lake right outside of Bangalore, I forgot to say it was closed. We got to go in because our friend pulled some strings, but most indians aren't allowed. This is because of drownings. For the most part, indians can't swim. So when an indian dude wades out a little too far and can't get back, there isn't much hope. When his friends (who also can't swim) rush out to help him, things only get worse. So they closed the lake. Except of course, for the little group of soldiers for the indian army that got a 5 hour lecture in the 85 degree heat in full uniform. And for another small group of 8 or so guys that sit and sing along to Akon and similar artists from their phone speaker. Indian guys do this all over actually. Any scenic place they'll sit and relax and listen to music from their phone, its pretty funny. As long as its not hindi music I'm not complaining.
Another day I was walking with the parents into a shop (Jensen and Steve were gone to Auroville for the week) and the security guard for the shop across the street all of the sudden had a seizure and fell back on his head. Foaming from the mouth and bleeding profusely from his head wound, the people around helped him and got him in an ambulance surprisingly quickly. It was a very strange happening. Made me feel bad for my joke about the ambulance a couple posts ago. So don't take that one too seriously.
More about traffic- at a red light, you can't take a free left turn. You can drive without lanes, maintain chaos on the road, but can't take a free left (same as a free right back home). While parked outside the dentist, some chick hit our car with hers, and just backs up and keeps going. When you get hit, you don't exchange insurance or inform the cops, you just say 'oops!' and keep going. Its funny how they have such random rules. Speaking of random rules, to buy a SIM card or get a refund or something else unimportant, you have to fill out very extensive forms of information that has no relevance. Steve signed a paper with a slightly different signature than that on his passport and had to re-do the whole thing. hahaha.
Jensen and I walked through a slum one day in Bangalore just to take some pictures and such. The kids swarmed us. This slum wasn't too desolate, most of the little houses put together from sheets of metal had satellite dishes on the roof hahah. Anywho, we walked into an open area and 20 kids surrounded us trying to get in every picture. After about 5 minutes we kept walking, and we realize that just looking around us, there were 4 kids squatting over, deucin on the sidewalk. Its a strange culture. This also means that since I wasn't watching every step, I was unfortunate enough to step in one child's gift. Stepping in human poop is something I've never really had to avoid before. hahaha!! And about thirty seconds after that, I came a few inches from steeping on the head of a dead dog. Yikes! Anyway, it was interesting to see the way of life they have so up close and personal. An amazing aspect of indian culture is how harmless they are. For the most part, no indian is out to hurt you. We walked through a slum, each holding $1000 cameras and didn't once feel unsafe or unwelcome. I feel like there's not too many places in this world where you can do that.
So there's a little more depth to Bangalore life. The trip to Rajasthan was amazing and I hope I can do it justice in writing.
The morning of the February 13th, I woke up and left the apartment at 8:30 for my 11:20 plane to Delhi. Traffic was slow, and I got there round 10:00. I had to check my backpack since they only allow one carry on, and I'd brought a big sack of food for the first day or so since I'd be on the move the whole time. I got through security on time and sat to wait for the plane. And waited. And waited. And they told us it was delayed a half hour...hour...4 hours. I'd been waiting in the airport all afternoon when I got hungry. The airline paid for our lunch since none of us had planned to be there that long. I'm not sure if it was the food or the water I drank, but something realllly didn't sit well. By the time I got in to Delhi I really wasn't feeling well.
I met Jensen at the train station and since all the trains that night were booked, we were forced to look for a room. Jensen had met a man on a train that had worked at a Sikh temple, where they offer accommodations to anyone for free. We took the metro to check it out and see if it would work to stay there. All the rooms were full though, so the only thing left was to sleep on the floor. As funny as that would have been later, I felt terrible and we wanted to sleep in a bed. We were in Old Delhi, and asked a bike rickshaw to take us to a cheap guest house. Jensen and I have no idea why, but none of the hotels in the area would accept foreigners. They just wouldn't give us a room anywhere. So our rickshaw driver took us superr deep because he thought he knew a place we could stay. My stomach was killing me, and the ride, in the dark, on bumpy roads hurt real bad. But it was kind of funny almost, that we were having such trouble finding what we thought would be a simple guest house. At one point we got pinned between trucks. The trucks, unloading bags of spices and such (which made the air sting haha) had arranged themselves so tightly in the street, they had blocked each other in and nobody could move! After 40 minutes, our rick driver pulled his bike up alongside the only hotel within a good few kilometers. The owner wanted way too much money, and we had no choice. So we settled into our room for the first night, a decently nice room. I fell asleep feeling terribly sick, and that night was not very pleasant.
We took a rickshaw in the morning back to the train station. In this area of Delhi, common to many other cities and such, there were nearly no women on the street. Still many, many men, but no women. Jensen and I started invented the "Find a Woman" game, where we go through the street (walking, in a rickshaw, taxi, etc.) and see who can find a woman first. Our longest game was 42 seconds, on a rickshaw, which means we travelled several blocks, saw maybe 100 or so men, and no women. hahaha!
We had to wait a few hours until they started booking the train that night at 2:30. We got back at 2:31 and they told us we would have to wait in.......an Indian queue! With no time to wait in a line 1.2 billion people long, Jensen and I agreed it would be worth it to spend maybe an additional 30 cents and book our tickets instantly through a travel agency. An hour later and they send us back to stand in the line. We got our ticket for a train leaving for Jodhpur 3 hours later. We'd seen pictures of some big fort in Delhi called the Red Fort, and with some time to kill, we went towards the subway station to take us somewhere maybe nearby it. On the way to the subway, getting slightly confused from conflicting directions, we looked down the road we were on, about 2 blocks away is a giant Red Fort. Out of all the places in this enormous city, we happened to walk straight there in the short amount of time we had, pretty cool. The price to get into the fort, however, is 10 rupees for locals, and 250 for foreigners, so we decided against it.
The train that night, to Jodhpur, was my first experience with an Indian train. We were in the sleeper car, which means we get fold out little mats that we can lay down and try to sleep on. I still was feeling very well, so I had some trouble closing my eyes. Also, up north it gets a lot colder at night, and my head was right next tot a window that wouldn't close, so I got pretty cold, and the train's horn stayed pretty much in use the whole time. hahahaah!! Even the trains honk nonstop.
We got to Jodhpur at 5 in the morning and hadn't slept much, so we went to a guest house and got a room to try and sleep. All their normal rooms were full and check out was at 9am so we would have to wait to get a room. Seeing that we were tired from basically no sleep the night before, they let us take a little nap in their nicer room until our room freed up.
Once settled in our own room, we set out to check out this magnificent fort sitting on a tall hill. The fort is 500 years old and built out of the stone they cut from the hill itself, so the hill has steep cliffs on all sides that make it stand out even more. To go in on a tour would have cost us another 250 rupees, so we decided to check out the area until maybe we could get in for free. The base of the walls had a little trail around them on top of the lower wall that we walked all around. We had a beautiful view of the city of blue houses that lay below us until the security made us leave.
So we walked back to the main entrance and snuck into the fort and walked past the entrance to the museum tour they've set up for tourists. We climbed up onto the top of a wall and saw a man with an empty bag of meat. Tons of large birds were circling us, and he explained that he throws mutton off the wall everyday to the birds at 3pm. We walked through a security guards little post while nobody was looking and starting climbing up. We walked around the very outer wall, on the edge of a several hundred foot drop-off. We ended up climbing walls and roofs until we were on the very very top of the fort, on top of Jodhpur, overlooking the endless expanse of variously colored houses. Getting down was trouble because the door we came through to get to the top had since been locked. We tried various other stairways, one of which took us to a very dark staircase covered in old pottery that had been stored there for who knows how long, with bats hanging above us. I walked into a room full of bats on accident and some freaked out and flew out and around. That way did connect back to the main are of the fort where we were trying to get, but the doors had been locked on the other side, for pretty obvious reasons. Eventually a guy saw us up top and came up to see what we were doing. We played it off as innocent, so he unlocked a door and took us back down.
I realize now that if I continue with so much detail, I probably won't ever finish writing this because there is just so much to say. So for the rest of the trip, I'll give a little summary and you can ask me later or something.
The first night in Jodhpur we met a nice man who had travelled all through India that took us to dinner and a bar and was incredibly friendly. He wanted to take us to a lake the next day but the way time worked out it didn't happen. We checked out the palace gardens across the city, and took an awesome hipline all through a canyon beneath the fort. One day we sat at our rooftop restaurant, looking over the whole city, from breakfast through lunch, playing cards, and bumping jams from the speakers they had set up. A nearby mosque had an hour and half long prayer and lecture session over their loudspeaker that drove us nearly insane haha. We stayed in Jodhpur until the 16th, a total of 3 days, before we left to meet mom in Ajmer.
We hopped on a train in the morning of the 17th in the general seating section for free, headed for Ajmer to meet Janny. Crowded and gnarly, we sat in the doorway, writing, reading and listening to music for the quick 5 hour ride. Met mom at the train station, and she was pretty flustered from the reality of traveling. Its very hard to comprehend and accept how many people there are in India, how dirty everywhere is, how loud everywhere is, and basically how chaotic everything is. Its hard for Jensen and me, and for a mom, its understandable that they would have a hard time adjusting at first. But she was ok. We took a taxi from Ajmer to a smaller nearby city, Pushkar.
We stayed in Pushkar for another 3 days. They have tons and tons of shops, with very intriguing and interesting goods and prices. We did loads of shopping and got some really fun stuff for decoration back home and such. We caught a train back to Jodhpur and stayed for another 3 days. We did the zip line again and took a tour through the fort. We even got the chance to meet the mutton man that feeds the eagles. He let us throw chunks of meet off a 550 year old fort wall that stands straight up about 3 or 4 hundred feet above the ground. It was amazing.
Janny was ready to head back to Bangalore and we were ready to get moving, so she flew home and we caught a bus to Jaislmer.
When we got to our perfectly cheap guest house, the owner tried pressuring us into a camel safari for way more than we wanted to pay. He said that he had 3 swedish girls booked to go tomorrow and if we paid now he could still get the licenses and such necessary for the trip, so we could go with them. We knew it was a bit steep, and that we should check other prices, but we didn't want to miss out on a trip with 3 swedish girls, so we decided to just go for it. We walked around the town that night and met 3 really nice guys. One was a shop owner that gave us a ride on his bike into town. The other two were sitting at the place I went to get some chai. They were both indian, but one has really bright blue eyes. He had started an organization locally known as the blue eyes school, that offered school to untouchable children. The other was a camel driver. We sat and talked with them for a while. We told them about our plans- how we were heading out for a safari in the morning with the 3 swedish girls. This was the worst news. We suspected, but now they confirmed that the 'swedish girls' weren't going, that actually, they didn't exist. Its a kind of scam the hotel owners use to get guys to book safaris right away. Pretty clever. They said as soon as we get back to the hotel, the owner will tell us the girls are feeling sick or something. So when we did get back, we asked them about the girls and they said everything was good and ready to go. Not caring too much about the girls specifically, but not wanting to go out into the desert just ourselves, we told them we wanted our money back if the girls fell through. All of the sudden, the girls were feeling sick and there was a chance they couldn't go. Once the argument got a little more heated, the girls couldn't go, and once we were basically yelling at them, there were no girls at all. Amazing how that works haha. The owner we were arguing with was clearly drunk, so we went and talked to his brother and got some money back, and got set up to go with a few guys that were heading out in the morning. Its never easy setting something up in India. No matter what, you always run into some kind of problem, but what happens while working through them is what always makes it some kind of exciting learning experience.
The camel safari was awesome. 3 days and 2 nights in the That desert with just Jensen, me, 2 really cool english guys, a hungarian and an austrian, and met up with a french man the last night. Turns out Jensen, who thought he wasn't allergic to anything on this planet, has a weakness for camels. His throats tightened up he developed a bad cough. When you experience your first allergic reaction in the middle of a desert in India and don't know why you all of the sudden are having trouble breathing, its fair to get pretty freaked out. But after a while he realized it was allergies and just lived through it. He was in a miserable physical condition the whole trip, but still stayed pretty positive and we had a great time.
After the desert, we stayed in a guest house in a hilltop fort for another day in Jaislmer. It was the same guest house that all our new friends were staying in, so we hung out that night playing cards and drinking at a rooftop table.
We took a bus the next day back to Jodhpur with our friends, said goodbye and continued on to Delhi that night. So in total there, thats about 15 hours of bus rides that day.
We got to Delhi in the morning of the 28th, and set up a bus to Rishikesh for that night, as well as a train back to Delhi the night before our flight home. That day in Delhi, we filled a big sack with more goods we bought from this huge street market. Tons of sick stuff, dirt cheap.
Rishikesh was beautiful. It's in the foothills of the Himalayas, and along the holiest of Indian rivers, the Ganges (which they call the Ganga, but I just don't like the sound really. Plus ganga is the spanish word for bargain, which just doesn't fit.) We explored along the bank of the river and around the town the first day. We sat and played chess at dinner. Rishikesh is the yoga capital of the world. There are lots of white people. It's peaceful, with nice temperatures, and very beautiful.
The second day we were walking along a highway to find a hike to a waterfall, but saw a beautiful beach along the river down below us. We bagged the waterfall and decided to head for the beach. In between us and the beach was a crazy steep dirt and rock slope. We jumped and surfed down the rocks, it was pretty insane. Big rocks would dislodge and fall alongside us and such. Very sketchy, incredibly fun, and it got us right to the beach, where we spent the majority of the rest of the day.
The next and last day of our trip, I was up all night sick. In the morning I had a killer headache and fever that lasted most of the day. We did yoga on a rooftop over the Ganges at sunset that evening. We met a brazilian and canadian guy there that we hung out with for the rest of the night. They were super friendly and nice. The people you meet traveling are always interesting people. It's not everyone that would leave their home and go to backpack through India for several months, so the people that are- the people that we meet- are typically very cool. We had to leave that night to get to the train station an hour away to catch the train back to Delhi.
I feel back leaving out so much from this trip. I got a little journal in Pushkar that I've taken with me wherever I go, so I jot down anything that happens that exciting of funny, so I remember almost all the amazing aspects of the trip. There are so many funny stories that would just take to long to write about, that I would love to tell you if I get the chance.
