Day 8:
February 14, 2005: to Jaipur
Here's the thing about driving in India. Lanes are irrelevant; in theory they drive on the British side of the road, but in reality people drive on whatever side of the road they please. No one uses blinker lights; instead, to signal presence or intent to pass, drivers make noise. Bicyclists ring their horns and bells; motorcyclists and trishaw-drivers honk, in a variety of tunes and ways; and cars and trunks blast their horns in their own staccato patterns.
Big trucks -- TATA trucks -- are all painted, on their tailgates, with variations on "HORN PLEASE" and "40KPH." These mean, respectively, that they hope you'll do them the courtesy of honking as you approach and pass, and that they can only go 40 kilometers per hour, about 23 mph.
The roads are also periodically clogged with pedestrians, cows, bulls and camels pulling carts, and stray dogs.
Oh, and the trucks belch black diesel fumes, and the trishaws are fueled with a noxious gasoline-motor oil mixture. "Emissions standards" is a developed-world notion which, perhaps unsurprisingly, hasn't reached India.
So driving in Rajasthani cities is a little terrifying. Ditto driving on Rajasthani highways, where every truck means a brake-slamming slowdown, some honking, and an attempt to pass -- sometimes thwarted by somebody else passing from the other direction. Half of our drive to Jaipur was spent on a major highway, which could have been fast and pleasant, but wasn't. Also, half of the highway was under construction (women carrying bowls of pebbles on their heads), which halved the number of lanes in which the chaos could happen. By the time we got to Jaipur, we were both carsick and headachy from the diesel fumes.
(We passed some nifty-looking weird trees, though.)
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And now and then, colorful pedestrians by the side of the road:
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Anyway, in Jaipur we stayed at the Madhuban, a "heritage home" (e.g. it used to be a noble's house; now it's a B&B). It's not quite as swank as the website leads one to expect, though it's quirky, with elephants painted on the exterior walls. Our room had two twin beds with tiles set into the headboards, a solar-heated hot shower, and two big windows overlooking the small garden. It was also by far our biggest bargain of the trip, costing 1200 Rs per night -- about thirty bucks.
Jaipur is part of the so-called Golden Triangle, the three cities (Jaipur, Agra, and Delhi) that most tourists visit. The tourist culture there was noticeably different from the other places we'd been: pushier, more crowded, and on the whole more frustrating. Our trishaw driver (who took us to the old city, painted pink as a sign of hospitality) was obnoxious and picked a fight with us about us not being in a good-enough mood (oddly, having a driver insulting our mood didn't do much to improve it!) and the experience set our teeth on edge a little.
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But we spent what was left of the afternoon strolling in old Jaipur, and had a couple of neat experiences. First we explored the Jantar Mantar, an observatory built by Jai Singh in the eighteenth century.
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It's like a vast sculpture garden of astronomical gauges, weird bowls and dials and arcs, some forty feet high. It's still used to gauge Hindu sacred time, which is apparently a time zone all its own, about eleven minutes off from the rest of Jaipur.
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Then we walked some of the pink city, spending a fair amount of time on a market street where they sell mostly goods that locals buy (as opposed to tourist goods). The vendors there were less pushy; I guess they figured it wasn't worth hassling us because we were unlikely to buy copper cookpots or kerosene lanterns. We bought a few strings of wooden beads from a guy there, in part because he didn't even try to give us a hard sell!
Then we took a bicycle rickshaw to the Surand Pole gate, to wander the quarter where the Rough Guide said the elephant owners would be. The rickshaw ride was bumpy and not very comfortable, but we thanked our driver effusively, and snapped a picture of him after he let us off!
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Once off the rickshaw, we ventured into the Muslim Quarter: more narrow streets, frequented this time by men in crocheted head-coverings and some women veiled in black. Here the greeting tended to be "salaam aleikum" instead of "namaste," and everyone was tickled that we knew the appropriate rejoinder (when Ethan replied "aleikum salaam" to a group of old men, they laughed, and tried to pull him into a mosque to pray with them, assuming I guess that if he knew that much Arabic, perhaps he was a fellow Muslim!)
The Rough Guide did say that it was possible the elephant owners might be moving to more spacious quarters, and after a while we decided they must have gone elsewhere; despite what we'd heard about the famed painted elephants of Jaipur, we weren't seeing any animals bigger than stray dogs. But it was fun wandering, getting lost in the wee alleys, sometimes followed by children banging drums who giggled at us.
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And then we turned a corner and lo and behold: elephant.
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I felt like Sam Gamgee marvelling at his "oliphaunts" -- I was so startled and charmed that I couldn't stop beaming. The elephant's owners brought it to kneeling and stripped its burden off its enormous shoulders; we handed them ten rupees (about a quarter) and followed them around the corner to the cement pen where the elephant lives. As they chained it to its post, they let me pet it. The underside of its trunk was lightly furred, and the tip of its trunk had wee dots on it; its eyes were enormous and limpid brown, and its ears flapped at me.
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I walked away on a cloud. Elephants!
Just before sundown, we saw kites tangled up in the telephone wires, an oddly poignant sight.
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And on our way out of the Muslim Quarter, a fish-and-chickens market:
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We took a trishaw to a Copper Kettle restaurant (not half as lovely as the one in Bombay, but the food was good) and lingered over dinner, reluctant to go back outside into the polluted city air.
Or, back to the index.