Two Views of Rajasthan from the Train

Our only camera was a little Canon PowerShot SD1100, no bigger than a box of Altoids. It had its limitations, but it was capable of impressive clarity and agility. We're not professional, or even really amateur, photographers, so doing what we could do with the PowerShot was plenty for us. Anyway, it managed to pluck these two images of Rajasthan's countryside from the blur that raced along outside the window of our speeding train.

The Great Thar Desert: Dawn

The only clouds Jaisalmer had seen for a month hid the stars that night, and they muddled the dawn, but the dawn was beautiful nonetheless, bleeding in from behind the gray. The sand was combed by the wind and it picked up the uneven glow of the sky. I took a few pictures.

Camel Safari Pictures: The Great Stinky Desert

So it turns out that camels fart constantly. During the whole of our two-day trek through the Great Thar Desert outside Jaisalmer, we were enveloped in a cloud of methane, much of which was generated from all the deposits left behind by other creatures on the desert floor, but to which our camels made prodigious contributions as we rode.

I'd heard that camels were uncomfortable to ride, but the abstract knowledge is nothing against the actual agony of the experience itself. You spend your first ten minutes on the back of a camel marveling at the view, the stilt-walking feel of the ride, and the comedy of the animal itself. You spend the rest of the time desperately looking forward to getting back down again.

We rode out through bean fields dried up for the summer, across a vast scrubby plain (stopping for a break at an atmospherically-abandoned village), to an isolated sand dune where we spent the night sleeping in the open air under a field of clouds that hid the spectacular stars we had been promised. We were cripplingly sore, the food was awful, the camels were surly, and there were scorpions in our blankets (okay, one scorpion). But, also, it was amazing.

The picture above, as well as the second and third photos below, are by Rachel.







More camel safari photos here.

North India Photo Highlights

Tombs of the Maharajas, outside Jaisalmer, India, at dawn

Rajasthan, Delhi, and the Taj Mahal...North India highlights from the Flickr page are here.

Photos from Jaisalmer

Gateway to Jaisalmer Fort

Once again, here's a flashback to India - this is from late February...

Our last stop in Rajasthan was Jaisalmer, a desert outpost not far from the border with Pakistan (in an area bustling with military activity, especially given the heightened tensions around the time of our visit). Jaisalmer grew wealthy as a stopover for camel caravans en route between India and Persia, protected by a storybook castle rising out of the sands, inside of which narrow lanes are now filled with shops catering to the new nomads: travelers dropping in before heading further out into the desert on multi-day camel safaris (I'll describe our own trek in a separate post). Today the fort is crumbling and in need of funds for preservation and repair.

Jaisalmer Fort

Internet and vegetable vendors, Jaisalmer town - photo by Rachel.

Lane inside Jaisalmer Fort - photo by Rachel.

Tombs of the Maharajas, near Jaisalamer, sunrise.

Jaisalmer town, viewed from the fort.

More Jaisalmer photos here.

Today is our last day in China - we're heading out in a little while to see some of the Olympic architecture, adding a historical bookend to our visits to the Forbidden City and Great Wall. Tomorrow we fly to Tokyo to begin the last two weeks of our trip. I'll try to get as many photos online as possible during the next few days.

Jodhpur Photos

Mehrangarh Fort looming over Jodhpur's old city

So, as mentioned below, the India posts are flashbacks to an earlier phase of the trip. We arrived in Jodhpur in late February, making it a stopover before beginning the final leg of our travels through Rajasthan.

The city is astounding. Like the other cities we visited in Rajasthan, it was once the capital of a small kingdom - in this case Marwar, which is in fact the place whose name means "land of death" (below, I incorrectly attributed that meaning to Mewar, the area around Udaipur - sorry, it's been a couple of months...).

The dramatic name is derived from the fact that Jodhpur stands at the edge of the Great Thar Desert, which stretches out death-ishly to the west. The old city comprises a vast jumble of square blue houses, painted in the color traditionally associated with the homes of Brahmins (though these days, as the palace museum's audio guide disdainfully notes, "anyone can paint his house blue"). Lording over it all is Mehrangarh Fort, a massive citadel that must have brought stomach-churning despair to any potential attackers who laid eyes on it.

Jodhpur was typical of Rajasthan for us in that it was an extraordinary place to see - and it looks great in pictures - but also full of hassle and kind of an annoying place to actually be. At any rate, here are some pictures, presented hassle-free.

Another view of the fort

Jodhpur old city

The three pictures below are by Rachel.

Central market

Blue house, old city

The Omlette Shop near the Central market: best omlette I've ever had.

More Jodhpur photos here.

Everybody Like Udaipur

The great fortress of Chittorgarh, stronghold of Mewar (whose name means "land of death")*, held against the forces of the Mughal Emperor Akbar for five months in 1567 and 1568, until finally there was nothing left for the fort's defenders but to perform the ancient and terrible act of jauhar - a final display of Rajput chivalry in which the men would don saffron robes and ride out to to their certain deaths at the hands of the enemy, while the women and children built a great fire and threw themselves on the flames.

One person who somehow managed to avoid the jauhar of 1568 was Mewar's ruler, Maharana Udai Singh, who instead escaped to found a new capital some miles further west. He called it Udaipur, and on a hill at its center he built a delightful new palace, which looks down on narrow, winding lanes in a delicate and whitewashed town, all of it reflected back again by the waters of Lake Pichola. "Everybody like Udaipur," said the autorickshaw driver who picked us up from the train station, and if the founding of the place was less than heroic, it's hard to argue with the city's charm. Udaipur is indeed easy to like, especially when viewed from one of the rooftop restaurants that populate the skyline, offering a great vantage point as the sunset tints the blue-and-whiteness of everything with a pale pink, while temple bells ring and the City Palace begins to glow. We only stayed a couple of days, but of course we took lots of pictures.

City Palace rising above Udaipur

Udaipur street scene

View from the "Monsoon Palace" overlooking Udaipur.

More Udaipur pictures here.

*OOPS - not true. Marwar is the land of death. Mewar apparently means "long wand" - make of it what you will.

Jaipur: Jantar Mantar

In between running a kingdom, founding a city, and commanding an imperial army, Jai Singh II managed to keep himself busy with astrological pursuits - overseeing the construction of five observatories scattered across northern India, of which the largest is in Jaipur. Visiting, you walk amongst fantastically big and odd-looking instruments designed to monitor the movements of the sun and the stars. We had a guide to explain the function of each of the (impressively sophisticated) devices, but I'm not sure I can remember everything he told us.

The concave structure above is actually half an instrument, separated to allow the court astronomers to walk in amongst its sections for better observation. Observation of what, I don't know.

I do know that the tower below is the world's largest sundial:

It's so precise that you can actually see the sun moving across it, counting the seconds. The actual dial part is a much larger version of the one pictured here (which served as a prototype):

Here's me with a smaller sundail calibrated to track the progress of the astrological period for Leo - my sign:

Finally, this wasn't actually in the observatory, but we thought this was a particularly well-dressed cow:

Jaipur: The Hawa Mahal

Jaipur from behind purdah: view through colored glass at the Hawa Mahal

The Rajputs - Rajasthan's historic warrior clans - were fiercely Hindu, but culturally they were affected by centuries of contact with Muslim traders and invaders. One Muslim tradition the Rajputs adopted was purdah, the practice by which women were to be kept out of the sight of men. The women of Jaipur's court observed a strict form of purdah, which had the effect of isolating them from the life of the city.

Both to mitigate and to facilitate this isolation, Maharajah Sawaj Pratap Singh ordered the construction in 1799 of the Hawa Mahal, a palace whose primary purpose was to serve as a sort of pink sandstone veil for the royal women. It's a virtually flat, five-story high building, an elegantly carved screen full of tiny windows, behind which the court women would sit to observe the action on the streets below. Here are a few pictures - the photo above, which is one of my favorites, is by Rachel, as is the last one below.

Jaipur: Pics from the Pink City

We arrived in Jaipur after a pair of short flights on Kingfisher Airlines, each of which afforded the opportunity to watch the first half of an entertaining Bollywood film whose title - and ending - we never managed to catch. About half of the passengers from the small plane disembarked with us, and together we were the only people in the terminal that evening.

During the taxi ride into the city center, we passed maybe a dozen brightly lit processions and outdoor banquet halls: wedding ceremonies held on Valentine's day, featuring turbaned grooms riding atop fantastically decorated white horses or elephants, preceeded by marching bands, attendants carrying giant lanterns, and guests in their finest clothes. Fireworks spotted the dark sky. It was an impressive introduction to a city that proved to be one of the most intense places - for better and for worse - we would visit in India.

Jaipur is one of the former princely states of Rajasthan, each of which was ruled by a Hindu maharaja in the days before Indian independence. Rajasthan's history is punctuated by stark and often militaristic forms of chivalry, tested by conflicts among the various states, but especially by the complex dance between the maharajas and the Mughal emperors, as the former variously fought to the death to maintain their states' independence, or sought to accomodate and adapt to Mughal power when necessary. Jaipur's founder, Maharaja Sawai Jai Singh II, built the city as a new capital after moving from nearby Amber fort (about which more later) in the early 18th century. Jai Singh, following family tradition, secured his kingdom's position through judicious diplomacy with the Mughal emporers - even serving as a top general to the notorious Emperor Aurangzeb, who rewarded him with the title "Sawai," meaning "one-and-a-quarter," indicating that the maharaja was distinctly greater than the average man.

A later maharaja had Jaipur's old city painted pink to welcome the Prince of Wales when he visited in 1853; the tradition has continued, and one of the most interesting aspects of visiting the city is walking around the old town, which hosts a series of bazaars with varying specialities depending on the street. It's an amazing experience, full of sensory overload brought on by the intense colors, smells, and sounds, the painted elephants and cart-pulling camels, the traffic and the touts, and the arched arcades tunneling chaotically through the dusty and glowing pink buildings all around.

The hassle in Jaipur - from vendors, rickshaw drivers, and random passers-by - gets exhausting after a while, and the city was also our first introduction to the cultural difference between northern and southern India, one aspect of which is that northerners are often noticeably unfriendly compared to their counterparts in Kerala. But as a place to experience, it's incredible.

The images from Jaipur are worth a few posts. Here are some pics from our day wandering around the pink city. All photos in this post, except for the pink shutters and the turban vendor, are by Rachel. More in later posts.