Rajisthan
Trip Start
Sep 11, 2007
1
6
8
Trip End
Jul 10, 2008
Udaipur,
India
Thursday, April 17, 2008
I climbed the hilltop shrines and wandered around Pushkar and then Katie and I left for Bundi. Bundi has a nice palace/fort on a hill which supposedly inspired the one in the Jungle Book. It did seem similar - lots of monkeys and overgrown, castle ruins. Pushkar is quite small and fairly pretty. It has a nice lake and a bunch of sites along the lake.
Monkeys are a bit of a problem in Bundi. At night, sometimes you hear all sorts of racket up on your roof - it's the monkeys grabbing anything they can and throwing it around! There is a solution to this - don't leave anything on your roof or in any way outside! I had a delightful monkey incident myself
q1
. I was sitting in an outside garden cafe. I had my backpack on the table and my black plastic bag in the middle of the table - with BANANAS and oranges. Katie and I had just finished eating. I was sitting there looking out at the view when suddenly: a big monkey swung in (the cafe had vines and shrubbery around our table) and jumped right in the middle of the table, grabbed my black plastic bag, and glanced at me! I was shocked for a moment, then ready to stop him (maybe try to grab my bag?) but also slightly worried about monkey bites and rabies. He saw my reaction and lept away a bit, then turned around and took a good look at me. He wanted more! He was looking around and looking at me. I realized I wasn't getting my bananas back so I tried to scare him away. I shouted aggressively, looked fierce, and mock lunged (also noticing he wasn't looking aggressive and lacked the red face/butt indication aggressive mating monkey). But he knew that I didn't fully mean it somehow! Then the shop owner came and yelled and the monkey took off! The shop owner said that you have to know how monkeys think. Very simply in terms of predator and prey. You have to make them really feel like you are hunting them. It was even worse for the people next door a minute later. We saw three monkeys looking from the third floor roof into a roof patio / hotel-room. Then one went in, then two, then three. Then there was a whole bunch of extremely shocked human screams, esp female! Hahaha! Err, not funny, not funny
q2
. It had just happened to me so I know what it's like!Next, Katie and I went to Udaipur. Udaipur is the city in the James Bond film Octopussy. They play it all over the city in restaurants! It is quite pretty. They have a palace, a lake palace and a mountain top monsoon palace. The lake view is beautiful with multiple palaces in / along the lake and their reflections right below them in the lake. The palace was ok and there were a lot of good restaurants and a good German Bakery (there are tons of "German" bakeries in India - if you can find a bakery, it's quite often "German"). Katie and I met a some other travellers. A Canadian, Dennis, and his girlfriend from France, Packo, had been motorcycling across Asia and Australia / NZ for 2 years!
Katie and I went to Ranakpur: exquisite, huge Jain temples a few hours outside Udaipur. Next we went horseback riding in the countryside which was quite pleasant! There were children running around and families farming. There was a lake and women doing laundry in it. The men were standing separately from the women, doing nothing (it's good to be an Indian man rather than an Indian woman).
I met an interesting local in Udaipur, Laxmi. Laxmi has Cerebral Palsey. So he has trouble moving his muscles to talk or walk. He walks on his knees and crawls a lot. Yet he is a successful classical music composer, he speaks Japanese, French, Spanish, not bad English as well as Hindi and his local language (Rajasthani?)
q3
. He is enthusiastic and a great guy. Very inspiring. He works as a watchman at the palace. He likes to meet travellers. He invited me for a couple excellent home-cooked meals and showed me around for a day which was quite fun. I'll post a photo of him. I have a great video of him with his musician friends in full costume at this colourful craft village, Shilpgram, playing his song - but it might be a bit too large to share.Finally, it was time for Katie and I to part ways. She wanted to go straight to Jaisalmer to do a camel tour and I wanted to do Gujarat first. She has 1 mo left in India before she heads to Thailand and she wants to hit Shimla, Varanassi and Calcutta primarily before flying out.
My next stop before leaving Rajasthan state for Gugarat state was Mt Abu. It is a tourist resort for Indians. It is beautiful with fountains, gardens and a pretty lake (not much rotting trash on the shore amazingly). I went on a trek in the mountains through a cave and to the dam that feeds the city which was built by the British. Dams are important here to catch the monsoon rains and supply water through the winter drought. There were lots of soft ice-cream shops here, also!
There was a spiritual retreat which I looked into in Mt Abu called the Brahma Kumaris. It is a huge worldwide organization and believes that all gods are the same universal god. They welcome Hindus, Christians, Muslims, etc. They dress in white and seem very calm. They do a certain kind of yoga meditation. A man suggested that if I don't believe in God than I can just take the parts of BK that deal with the self. So I got signed up for an intro thing with a German woman but she just tried to indoctinate me in annoying beliefs. I am my soul, not my body. My soul controls my body from a point right behind my eyes, between the two halves of my brain. This point shines with bright, supernatual, white light. How did they discover this? It just occurs to soul-conscious people. For some souls, they are slower to become soul-conscious and for some, faster. Sometimes you are just doing everyday activities when it happens. It helps to be at peace and think positive thoughts. Just think: can you feel that white light between the two halves of your brain?
