Chittor to Agra: ruins, tigers, birds and the Taj
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Agra,
India
Tuesday, April 6, 2004
... in which the hero exlores eastern Rajastan and meets representatives of it its fearsome wildlife...
CHITTOR
Chittor, or Chittaurgarh, is three hours by train east of Udaipur, and holds a proud Hindi fortress that never fell to the Muslim invaders. On three desperate occassions in its history, the women and children of the fortress comitted mass suicide by throwing themselves onto huge sacred fires, before their men smeared themselves with the ashes, and rode off to certain death on the battlefields of the Muslim invaders. Impressive stuff.
With a cranky Indian rental bike (no gears, no adjustable saddle, bad brakes) I pedalled (and walked) up the steep hill which towers some 200m over the small town centre. Up on the top, the fortress is like the deck of an airplane carrier - it's mostly flat with scattered ruins, temples and a small village, with steep drops down to the plains behind the well-preserved walls.
Most impressive here was the 15th century victory tower: a massive 40m high stone tower with great carved decorations and views. In the park surrounding it, Indian families sat in the shade while watching the dozens of cheeky rhesus monkeys hanging around in the trees and the ruins. Some women were selling chickpeas in folded bits of newspaper to feed to the monkeys - invariably, when a child held the nuts, a monkey would come up and aggressivly grab what it could, leaving the child in tears. Monkeys are not as cuddly as they look.
Just below the tower is what kept the fortress going all those years: a natural well where water comes from an opening in the wall carved into the shape of a cow's mouth. The sacred pool below the well was full of people washing themselves and their clothes in the water, or just larking about in the heat of the day. The Indians that come here are often from surrounding areas, and don't often see foreigners, so I got plenty of interested people staring or coming up to ask where I'm from. I guess it's only fair - we come to India to look at the locals, and they have a good time looking back at us.
Another religious festival was taking place - hundreds of Hindu pilgrims were congregating at a temple on the edge of the fortress, where stands were selling puja (things to offer like coconuts and colourful red flags decorated with swastikas). Inside the temple, guards were keeping the lines of men and women seperated as they shuffled to the centre of the temple where priests were accepting and blessing the puja. Far beyond the temple I saw trucks and tractor-carts full of people camp out under trees for the coming days. Religion really is a big thing in India.
BUNDI
Of the two trains that left towards Bundi from Chittor, I unwisely took the 'personal' train, instead of the express service. It took five hours to cover the 180km to Bundi, of which hours where spent on sidetracks, waiting for delayed freight and express trains, and for a new locomotive from Chittor after ours broke down. The wooden benches didn't help to make us all feel comfy. Interestingly, we passed the "Palace On Wheels" express: this is an airconditioned delux tourist train that does weekly runs from Delhi to the main monuments of North India. They're paying hundreds of euros for their tickets (and god knows how much for the chilled drinks on board), while today my train ride cost me 26 rupees, about €0.50. No chilled drinks though.
If you've read Rudyard Kipling, you know what Bundi is like. The writer of the Jungle Book lived and worked here, writing his book 'Kim' from the beautiful Sukh Mahal palace overlooking a lake with Kingfishers, langur monkeys and people doing their laundry.
A guide took me on a tour through the empty Targarh palace, which seems to roll off the hill above town in waves of elegant domes and balconies. It's famous for its 16th-18th century paintings, as the maharadja (the current one is a businessman in Delhi) used to love wall paintings. The best room had the whole life of Krishna depicted on the walls, sybolising the path of life you take from a careless youth with cheeky tricks to assuming responsibility and power after marriage, and a peaceful old age. The roms was protected against monkeys by cages all around, and a seperate cage was set around the original slippers of the maharadja, who after a life of ruling, killing and making lots of babies, renounced power and became a sadhu, a holy man with no posessions... and not vey much clothes.
There's always a festival on somewhere in India, and today it was Ram's birthday. Ram is one of the more important and popular Hindu gods, and the whole town came out in their Sunday best saris to watch a procession at sunset. Tractors and trucks carried children enacting scenes from Ram's life. In between the vehicles, men struggled to push generators along on rickety carts, to supply electricity to light up the trucks. Their children held the wires taught. Alongside the procession, children carried neon lights that were all wired up to a generator at the back of the procession, that regularly failed or got caught in something.
Most people were exhiliarated to see the procession (it seems to be one of the few times that all the women also get to leave the houses and mingle in the streets). I walked up to the temple the procession started, and was showered with flower petals by a man who was more than delighted to see a foreigner here, wishing me happy Ram's birthday too. He was an English teacher (though I had a bit of trouble understanding all his Indian English) who had not been to England. He tried to buy me a cup of tea, but the chai wallah (tea salesman) had already closed for the day.
RATHAMBORE TIGER PARK
After a maddening but thankfully short bus ride (on the road: two seriously smashed-up cars that had driven into the back of a truck, and one overturned truck with stone slabs) I got to the scruffy city of Kota, which had a sign at the city limits saying 'Kota nuclear power plant welcomes you'. At the station I tanked up on cash rupees from the airconditioned and guarded ATM room, and boarded the Mumbai-Delhi express, getting off after two hours at Sawai Madhopur, near Rathambore Tiger Park.
With about 40 tigers on 70 square kilometers, Rathambore does not have the most tigers or the largest park area, but it does have the best chance to see them from up close - they are not shy at all and sometimes walk up to the vehicles in the park. Entry is strictly limited to some 30 jeeps (called gypsies, and seating 4) and open-top buses ('canters', seating 20), in two shifts per day, following prescribed routes via checkpoints. That way, the wildlife is only confronted with minimum human activity, and only for 6 hours per day.
After some pretty crappy hotels, I decided to splash out and went to the Ranthambore Bagh hotel, which had tents equipped with beds, air-cooling, toilets and showers. Wonderfully cool at night! It turned out to be the place where professional wildlife photographers stay, and I met Theo, a German photographer from near the Dutch border (He was delighted to hear that I had been on a bike trip once through his village near Kevelaer) who loves tigers and already spent three weeks in the park every day, with five weeks to go. Often he spends hours on one spot, waiting for a tiger to move around or get into some hunting action.
I hadn't planned on doing much that afternoon, but I arrived just on time to join the afternoon shift of canters and jeeps. Luckily, it turned out to be one of the best days all week in Ranthambore.
The park is a set of valleys with lakes, crumbling hunting lodges built by long-dead maharadjas, steppe-like grasslands and dry forest areas, all surrounded by high hills. It's not as green as the 'tiger jungle' depicted in Disney's Jungle Book, but much drier and browner. It's entered via an impressive gorge, with crocodiles and turtles in the river and vultures perched on the cliffs. The people who once lived in these valleys had been moved out to places around the park, only the temples remained from their old villages. One important temple to Ganesh, the elephant-headed god of good luck, remains near the Ranthambore fortress in the middle of the park, and every day Hindu pilgrims and also hundreds of letters arrive here, asking for a happy marriage.
Our canter passed the entrance near a monkey-filled banjan tree, and just 10m into the park we stopped and spotted tigers' prints on the road (50% of all tiger viewings are on the roads). They were huge - the size of your palm. Compare that to your domestic cat and you'll get an idea of the size of tigers. Soon enough we arrived at a stunningly beautiful half-dry lake in the centre of the park. Birds, deer and summer buck (a large kind of antilope) were standing around grazing or drinking, quite undisturbed by the jeeps and canters. The lake had an old stone hunting lodge on an island in the middle. Inside one of the arches, we could see a tiger resting. It was only in the distance, but clear anyway. Our driver was very clued up on the park, and instead of driving the prescribed route through the park, somehow managed to keep us near the lake all afternoon.
After a while, the tiger stood up, and then started resting in the middle arch of the building. We waited, and after a while it walked out, disappeared into the bushes, and appeared at the lakeside. This caused panic - the deer let out loud warning cries and splashed across the lake to safety, and birds flapped off. Being a tiger is not good for your social contacts.
After disappearing into the bushes again we drove around the lake, spotting cool birds and crocodiles, the tiger was seen walking towards the road, and all the drivers went mad to get us the best view. Imagine three canters and five jeeps bouncing top-speed over dusty roads to get to close the tiger without scaring it.
The tiger had walked onto the road and into the high grass nest to it - just 10m from our truck, and driving backwards we followed it for 10 minutes as it calmly plodded along, completely ignoring the 50 cameras clicking away. It was huge - its shoulders 1-1.5m high, and walked slowly, just like a domestic cat, but you could see the big muscles rolling under the fur.
It crossed the road again, disappeared in the bushes, and came out after the other vehicles had gone to the other side of the bushes - we remained and saw it appear again, stalking a deer, and then jump out of sight, after which we (probably) heard a dying deer. (Theo told us afterwards that seeing a tiger pounce, and a probable kill, is very rare). Soon afterwards we saw a second tiger nearby, but we had seen enough action and had to head to the exit.
The next day I joined both the morning and afternoon tours, but saw no tigers. We did see loads of other animals, including colourful birds like three types of kingfisher, the bright blue Indian Roller, the tiny spotted owl, the huge and rare eagle owl, vultures, wild boar, rhesus and langur monkeys (actually, there's a monkey looking into the internet cafe as I type right now) and many fearless deer and summer buck who stood munching grass right next to the canter. A fabulous experience, even without a tiger sighting.
BHARATPUR BIRD SANCTUARY
Just a few hours by train north of Ranthambore lies a marshland that is one of the most important for birds in India. Together with Miranda, a Dutch girl from my town Utrecht, who I met on the canter, we rented bikes and set out to spend the whole day peering at feathered animals. The marshland is disected by roads on dykes, and the trees along the roads allow you to see the birds from very near.
Although the main migratory season is over, it was an impressive sight, with many kingfishers, hoopoes, big golden (bhramin) ducks, white and coloured ibises, huge sarus cranes, and thousands of egrets, black and painted storks and herons. We spotted a few types of turtles (one metre-long one in the water) and again many deer and nilgai sloshing around the marsh, eating weeds.
We stayed from sunrise to sunset, watching the birds get active with eating and fishing, lazing around in the shade during the hot hours, and busy with more eating and nesting in the evening. The silence of the park was great, only disturbed by screeching and quacking.
FATEHPUR SIKRI + AGRA
Enough animals, time for some culture now. Miranda and I took a bus 30km east to the deserted city of Fatehpur Sikri. Akbar, the most succesful Musilm ruler of India, had built his new capital city here in the 1600s, but abandoned the whole thing after 30 years, when the water shortages caused him to move to nearby Agra. What remains is a huge, well preserved palace complex and an equally huge mosque, all decorated beautifully with sandstone and marble carvings. The ruins were impressive, and the still-used mosque had a dazzling white marble tomb to a Muslim sheik, with fabulously carved lattice screens.
We were firmly on the tourist train again - busloads of French people, plenty of pesky Indians trying to sell internet/guiding services/toilet papers/cold drinks. I'm noticing that the few words of Hindi I know really surprise the locals - they're used to mute tourists who don't bother to learn the basics.
Another short busride further (with some people begging with chained bears along the road) and we arrived in Agra, capital of tourist scams and home of the Taj Mahal and a Pizza Hut. Even before we arrived they tried it - a man came aboard saying we were near the Taj and should get off. You can't fool a geaographer with a map in his hands, so I knew it was still far away and he was a rickshaw driver trying to make a day's earnings with one ride.
But as the main tourism season is over, hotels are near-empty and rickshaw drivers bored - so it's much easier to get fair prices than normal. We got the hotel room prices down by half just by pretending to walk away - there are many alternatives in the area. Walking away is the best way to get the price down - after a minute of haggling with a driver just a small move towards one of his colleagues will do the trick and get you a fair price.
Now for the Taj Mahal then. Miranda and I had promised each other not to look at the Taj before we were standing right in front of it, so after checking into our hotel right next to the Taj we took another rickshaw to see Akbar's impressive tomb, 10km north of town in Sikandra. After a stroll through Agra's chaotic and very heavily polluted bazaar area, I felt not at all well (first time this trip - probably the heat and overactivity of the past days) and went to bed early.
At the crack of dawn we entered the Taj gates to be there in time for sunrise, when it is at its best. The building is a tomb, a memorial to Mumtaz, the wife of Shah Jahan, who died while giving birth to het 14th (!) child. It's difficult to say what the Taj is like. We came to the conclusion that it was really the most beautiful building we'd ever seen, and in real life it's much better than on the pictures you all know. In the soft morning light it really seemed to hover above the ground in the distance, when I saw it first. As the sun came up, shadows appeared and moved around, hghlighting the carvings and the inlaid flower patterns, but I preferred it as it was early in the morning.
Inside, a fantastic marble lattice screen with inlaid flowers surrounded the tombs of Mumtaz and her husband. The Taj itself stoon in a large garden and was surrounded by symmetrical mosques and entrance gates that would have been top-sights even without the Taj Mahal in the middle. A beautiful place to hang around for a while.
I spent some time watching the completely corrupt gardeners, who were much better at fleecing tourists than at pruning plants. They were experts in showing foreigners how to take the best water reflection photos, and were greedily demanding tips. The lawnmowers, who were using a quaint cow-drawn lawnmower, were inviting pensioned Japanese and American tourists to pose with the contraption, and were making a killing off the tips - although when I left the area four hours later the lawn still only had two lanes of short grass, and the cows looked extremely bored.
The entry fee is an incredible 750Rs (€14), much more than the usual 100-200Rs for big sights, and certainly more than the 40Rs that Indians have to pay to get in. It would be fine, if it weren't for the fact that not much of this money goes to the monument, but usually ends up in a politician's pocket. The 200m exclusion zone around the Taj (no motor-driven vehicles allowed there) does make a small difference for the air and sound pollution, but more measures need to be taken in the Taj is to stay white.
The rest of the day was spent relaxing, booking night train tickets to Delhi for Miranda and Varanasi for me (amazingly quick, done in 10 minutes) and sending a parcel to Holland (incredibly slow, it took me three hours in total). We took a rickshaw to the modern part of town to see the place mid-class Indians live, shop, and visit modern coffee shops and had a great vegetarian meal at a place called 'Zorba the Buddha'. A very different experience from the congested Taj and old Agra areas that most tourists get to see.
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Next up: Varanasi, the holy Hindu city where everyone comes to die and get cremated.
Mood: very sweaty, could do with a cold Erdinger Weissbier
Health: tip-top
Sign of the day: 'Englis School' (advertisement on a rickshaw)
