2nd April – Jodhpur to Udaipur:
In some ways it was sad to leave Jodhpur only the day after we’d arrived – there was definitely more to explore there. But on the other hand, we’d seen by far Jodhpur’s main attraction (the fort from the previous day), and all our reading/research on Udaipur had us both pretty excited about the next few days.
Due to the nature of Jodhpur’s streets (their width is tiny with open sewers on either side and they’re barely big enough for bikes/ltuktuks), our journey today started with a walk downhill followed by a 10 minute tuktuk drive to meet our taxi driver – the taxi couldn’t get any closer to us! His name was Ratan (not much English but nice and friendly), and the car we’d been given was actually an upgrade from what we’d expected, so we got a bit of extra leg room for the day – won’t complain!
Our first and only stop on the 5/6hr journey from Jodhpur to Udaipur was at the Jain temple in Ranakpur – the actual driving was a mixture of long motorways (toll roads) with decent road surfaces, and small country roads with potholes and cows galore, so after 3 hours we were both pretty glad to get out for a break! We bought our tickets to enter the temple (which included a free audio guide), and also bought one camera pass which we’d hoped would be OK for the two of us – unfortunately, the guards were very pernickety and required one pass per camera, so I relented and bought another one (it’s only about £1/pass, so not the end of the world, but it’s the same at every attraction, which does add up – not to mention that sometimes the prices are astronomical. The worst we’ve seen is a £10 video camera pass, even for your own personal use, despite a £2 entry ticket?!)
The temple was very, very impressive – Jainism is, as far as I understand and as best as I can explain in a sentence or two, a religion highly linked to Hinduism with slightly different beliefs i.e. the most famous belief is that all animals are sacred and that none should be harmed, and as such the most devout Jains often wear face masks in order not to breathe in (and therefore kill) any small insects when walking around the streets. A certain Jain sect also believe that nudity is an essential way of life – fortunately this temple was not of that Jain sect, so we were spared that ordeal.
Some highlights from the temple include:
- Amazing carvings could be found everywhere you looked, from the ceiling to the pillars to the floor and the doorways – all out of marble
- There was a main shrine, dedicated to (in rough terms) the last of the 24 main gods in Jainism – we weren’t allowed to take photos of this, or even approach the shrine, so we had to admire from about 5m back
- There was a marble elephant which promised good luck to all who crawled underneath it – we saw a couple of people do it, but the guards looked pretty strict and had already told me off for trying to take a photo of the shrine, so we gave it a miss – doomed forever by the sounds of it then…
- Hannah had a brief but funny encounter with about 10 indian school girls who had come to visit the temple – at first they just looked at her quizzically, then one of them braved it and came to say hi and shake her hand, which meant that they all followed suit. And obviously they just had to have a photo with her too!
After spending about 90 minutes inside listening to the audio guide, we called it a day and went outside to try and get some food – unfortunately, the on-site canteen had closed minutes before we arrived, so instead we endured 40 minutes of windy, hilly roads in the taxi before he dropped us at an outrageously overpriced restaurant that served vegetable rice (which was pretty terrible). Being in the middle of nowhere, we didn’t have too much choice, but yeh, it was pretty bad.
The last bit of the trip took about 2 hours, and before long we’d arrived in Udaipur – the roads weren’t as bad as Jodhpur, but they weren’t that much better, so the last leg of the journey we had to complete via tuktuk – it cost 50INR (down from 100) but even that was overpriced as it ended up being about 2 minutes away. Honestly… We checked in to Kankarwa Haveli (a family run hotel) and had been upgraded from ‘partial lake view’ to ‘full lake view’ – bonus! And the room was pretty swish too! The hotel didn’t do standard dinners, so we decided to go to the roof top restaurant next door for a beer and a pretty good curry. But the view was definitely the best bit – Lake Pichola at night is pretty stunning, and it’s easy to see why Udaipur is called the most romantic city in India.
Having had a few days now where we were on the go, we decided to have a lazy morning. We got up for breakfast on the roof of our hotel (the waiter put the menu down and said that the breakfast was included in our room unbeknownst to us – bonus), and then we just chilled out in the hotel until lunchtime.
Having done a bit of research that morning, we noticed there was a café serving bacon sandwiches just down the road, so we headed there for lunch – the sandwich was full of some sorry looking salad and smothered in butter, but the bacon more than made up for it!
At 5pm we did a boat tour of the Lake, which involved spending about 30 minutes touring around the outskirt of the lake (or at least the bit of the lake that wasn’t coated in algae and sewage). We saw lots of famous Udaipur sights – Jag Mandir and Lake Palace (two extensions of the City Palace that are essentially islands in the lake; now both have been converted to (pretty swanky) hotels that were unfortunately not in our budget), the back end of City Palace, lots of hotels and even our hotel room (noticeable due to our T-shirts hanging up to dry in the window!
We’d booked a booth/table at a nearby restaurant that evening, so headed there for a cocktail/beer followed by another curry (who’d have guessed). It’d been great to just chill out today, and Udaipur was a good place to do just that. In some ways, it’s very like the expression ‘You can’t shine a turd, but you can sprinkle glitter on it’ – it’s still very much India, with all of its traffic and scammers and sewage and litter and smells, but it does have a bit of a sparkle in the form of the Lake and the rooftop restaurants that other places didn’t necessarily.
We’d done a bit of research the previous day and decided that today would be as good a time as any to do an Indian cooking class – so at 10:30, along with another German couple in a nearby hotel, we made our way to Shashi’s house via a very cramped tuktuk for our class. It took a little while longer than we’d thought as the roads were pretty packed at points (it was Hanuman, the monkey god’s birthday, and as such there were parades and celebrations taking place). Once we arrived (and the ladies had received their bindis from the host), Shashi sat us down and began to explain a bit about herself.
In a nutshell, Shashi is part of the Brahmin caste (there are several different castes within Hinduism/cultural India, and each caste has different rules and its members are expected to follow different roles within society). Brahmins are the highest caste, and as such they’re expected to be doctors, lawyers, accountants etc. Unfortunately, Shashi became a widow very early in her life (around 30) and one of the rules of the Brahmin caste is that you can only ever marry once – as such, she is destined to be single until she dies. Without her husband or any financial support from elsewhere (her husband did not have a government job, she explained, and as such received little support from his previous employer), she had to take matters into her own hands. As such, she started cooking for a restaurant that her brother-in-law owned. After two Irish girls visited Udaipur several years ago and came into contact with Shashi, they advised her to start cooking classes and the rest, as they say, is history.
Shashi had prepared a 10-12 page menu for us, and after going through it all and explaining it to us in detail, we started. The menu included:
- Paneer Butter Masala and Aloo Masala (the masala was made using Shashi’s ‘Magic Sauce’)
- Naan, Roti, Savoury Paranthas and Sweet Paranthas
Shashi was fantastic as a host – chatty, funny and very direct as well (‘Stir! Stop! Twist! Push!’). Aside from being chief pestle and mortar grinder (young man = best person for the job apparently), we all had a go at making each of the different types of bread, which was great fun. It’s fairly safe to say that neither of us will ever be satisfied with ready-made Naan’s from supermarkets ever again!
After cooking all that food, we were both pretty ravenous and tucked in along with the other couple – the whole thing tasted fantastic, particularly the paneer butter masala and the coconut paranthas, and given that we have the menus with us to take back home, the Lewis’ and the Dillarstones’ can expect some culinary delights when we’re both back (assuming we can replicate it all of course, which may prove tricky…)
We’d stuffed ourselves full of as much food as possible before saying goodbye and thanking Shashi for the class – we then tuktuked back to the hotel (much quicker this time as the celebrations had died down by this point). That evening, we made our way to a highly-acclaimed dance show around the corner, where coincidentally we saw Morten and Ema from our camel safari again – bizarre! We sat with them during the show, which was actually very good – some interesting dances at the start (despite the compere not speaking very clearly), followed by some puppet shows (which the Indian kids absolutely loved) and then finally, an older lady did a five minute dance which culminated in her dancing whilst balancing 11 pots on her head. Pretty impressive I must say…
5th April – Udaipur to Mumbai
Our last day in Udaipur, and we were both sad to leave as it had been a great couple of days, and a good bit of respite. After clearing the room and having breakfast upstairs, we made our way to City Palace – probably the main tourist attraction in Udaipur. After buying the 200INR tickets and sharing a 100INR audio guide between us, we made our way into the Palace Museum. Again, the camera fees were relatively pricey, so we opted against – and unlike other places they made you deposit your cameras that you weren’t using with a guard just outside the entrance. Very stringent (and non-Indian!)
The museum was great, and very interesting. It talked a lot about the Mewar dynasty, who ruled Udaipur centuries before. Some of the most interesting parts of the tour were:
- Unlike all other cities that we had seen (i.e. Jaisalmer, Jodhpur etc.), the Mewars never surrended or joined forces with the Mugahls – impressive feat!
- Pratap Mawal, one particular Mewar ruler, cared very deeply about his horse – he also devised a clever trick, which was to attach an elephant trunk to the horse’s mouth before battle. Pratap preferred to use horses rather than elephants in battle due to the advantages of speed and agility, but obviously a horse is no match for an angry elephant. That’s where the fake trunk comes in – an elephant will never try to hurt a baby elephant, and as such, the fake trunk proved to be very successful in helping Pratap deal with elephants in battle.
- One Mewar ‘king’ had a daughter that was (accidentally?) promised to the rulers of two cities at the same time – unfortunately for the daughter, the king realised that agreeing to wed his daughter to either ruler would risk waging war with the other city, so he opted to kill his daughter instead using poison – problem solved.
- At the time of the British rule, the King of England came to visit and invited all the Rajasthani rulers to attend a summit in Delhi to discuss the future. The Mewar ruler at the time decided to only attend if he was guaranteed to have a good seat at the table, which he was promised. Unfortunately, when he arrived, he discovered he was sat behind a number of the other Rajasthani rulers, so he hopped on the train and just went back home!
- We saw some fantastic miniature paintings – as Hannah has said previously, miniature means incredibly detailed rather than small in size, and the level of detail on the faces of the men and women in the paintings is truly astounding.
By 2pm we had finished the tour, so decided to go to a restaurant nearby to the hotel that advertised wood-fire pizzas. Unfortunately, after trekking up the stairs, they announced that they weren’t available at lunch, so we trekked back down and then went to a different restaurant with some awful tuna sandwiches (more butter than tuna) and drinks. Interesting side note – some scenes from the James Bond film Octopussy were filmed in Udaipur, and as such, there are strong references everywhere to the film (ranging from nightly film showings at some restaurants to 007 room numbers in hotels). Dad – worth knowing that if you came here you’d be a celebrity!
The afternoon started out well, and ended badly – unfortunately, the owner of the hotel tried to charge us almost £15 for our breakfasts during our stay there. Despite the fact that the waiter had repeatedly told us it was included in our room, the owner at first refused to budge (saying that a) the waiter didn’t say that and b) he didn’t say breakfast was included in his confirmation email to us (in fact there was no mention of breakfast at all there!). In the end he caved, and he grumpily said he’d just pay for it himself out of his own pocket – we then told him that he’d not charged us for 6 bottles of water we’d had during our stay, and he cheered up ever so slightly after that.
We went back to the pizza place in the evening for dinner and only after we’d been there for 30 minutes and made our way through a beer did the waiter tell us that the ‘pizza man’ wasn’t in this evening – great, thanks for that. We stayed there for a reasonably good curry, before heading back to the hotel to grab our bags and get a tuktuk to the train station. Catching the train was very easy, as the train originated in Udaipur, so we found our bunks and settled down, ready for the 17hrs of journeying that lay ahead…
Neither of us slept particularly well on the train – first, there was a teenage girl who was on the phone the WHOLE TIME (even at 3am she was still nattering away – to who?!). Then a family (with a baby) arrived at about 5am, were pretty noisy settling in, and it didn’t take long for the baby to make her presence known either. Finally, from about 5am as well, we had shouts of ‘chaaaaiiiiiii sinnnnggghhhh’ being bellowed down the aisles as the food/chai-wallahs tried to sell their goods to some early risers. A pretty sleepless night in comparison to some others…
We were so tired that we both completely switched off when we arrived in Mumbai, and ended up paying almost £10 for an hour long taxi – not bad by English standards, but horrendously overpriced for Mumbai. Oh well… We checked into our hotel (very good value by Mumbai standards, as everything is normally cheap and filthy or clean and expensive). Having not had breakfast or lunch by this point (only snacks we’d brought with us), we were both pretty starving, so walked 10 minutes down the road to Leopold’s. This place is a Mumbai establishment – packed with tourists and expats, as well as some locals, it had a TGI Friday/Hard Rock Café vibe to it. The food we had was very decent, as was the dessert, and it was only really the service that could be improved (finding a waiter was like a game of ‘Where’s Wally?’). Unfortunately, Leopold’s also has a bit of macabre history that was visible – it was one of the main targets of the Mumbai terrorist attacks of 2008, and there were still bullet holes in the walls from back then. In some ways it’s nice that the terrorists didn’t change anything and that it still lives on, and in others it was odd knowing we were sitting somewhere where ten people had been killed.
The evening was spent planning the next few days and researching tours of Mumbai, as well as taking a quick stroll down the waterfront to look at the Gateway of India (more on that tomorrow). It was mired slightly because I spotted a rat in the storage space above our room as we descended the stairs to our door, but we didn’t hear anything more from it after that and the hotel staff did a reasonable job of tidying up and flushing it out when we reported it.
After a quick breakfast at an Iranian café close to the hotel (greasy omelettes and roti for about £1.50 between us), we headed to the Gateway of India to meet our guide for the morning, Pranali (a 19-year old student who worked part time giving tours). The tour took about 3.5hrs overall, and gave us a very good sense of Mumbai as a city, and also its history:
- Our first stop was where we were standing – the Gateway of India. It was built for the arrival of the King and Queen of England in the late 19th/early 20th century, and is a very impressive monument. It also has particular significance to Mumbaikers as it was the gate that the last British troops left India through, and also the gate through which Gandhi arrived back into England.
- We also stopped to look at the Taj Palace Hotel and Tower – a fantastically expensive hotel overlooking the waterfront that was also the victim of the 2008 attacks.
- We also learnt a bit about the history of Mumbai – it was originally a number of islands (seven I believe) that were owned by Portugal, and after being gifted to England as part of a marriage settlement, it was leased to the East India Company, who filled in the gaps to make a peninsular (I didn’t even know that was possible!) Since then, Mumbai has experienced huge trade, and is booming as the financial and business capital of India.
- The British Heritage District of Mumbai was our next stop, and we walked through seeing a number of buildings (such as the Prince of Wales museum) with very impressive architecture
- Watsons Hotel (or lack of) was also very interesting – an Indian man was once refused entry there due to his race, so he went and built a hotel himself as revenge. Now, Watsons is defunct and the building is about to collapse, the hotel the Indian built is the Taj Palace, and the man himself is from the TATA family – a huge name in Indian automobile manufacturing and engineering.
- We saw the Oval Maiden cricket ground, which was basically just a long thin strip of sports ground in the middle of the city. When we were there, there were about 5 matches taking place, but Pranali said at its peak there could be up to 25 matches going on at once!
- We then caught a bus along the waterfront to the Mani Gandhi museum – this was very similar to the Gandhi museum in Delhi, so I won’t elaborate too much other than to say that copies of Gandhi’s letters to Hitler and Roosevelt were on display (which were fascinating).
- Next: a taxi to a snack shop where we sampled a number of stereotypical Indian snacks such as sev puri and pani puri (think chickpeas, coriander, lots of sauce and rice pancakes). We also had drinks there, and whilst my coconut one was quite nice, Hannah’s mint drink was so bitter and salty that it was undrinkable!
- Dhobi Ghat was our penultimate stop – in a nutshell, it’s Mumbai’s huge outdoors laundry, where thousands of workers wash hundreds of garments each day in big baths/tubs (with the water turning a nasty grey colour). Pranali said that the monsoon makes this job difficult (drying the clothes in particular) – I dread to think what the place would look like in that rain…
- Finally, we taxied to CST – the main railway station in Mumbai, which is quite similar architecturally to St. Pancras.
It was a whistlestop tour of only a fraction of the city, but Hannah and I both agreed that it gave us a good impression of the place – and despite reading that Mumbai is like marmite, we found ourselves really enjoying it (much more than Delhi anyway).
That afternoon, we put ourselves through our paces in the gym 2 floors below our hotel (£2/session – not bad) and then, after several days of curries, decided to make the most of a bit of home comfort by having a few drinks at a cocktail bar during Happy Hour, followed by Pizza Express. Having said just the day before that I’d kill for a Pizza Express pizza, I was in shock when Hannah spotted it whilst on the tour that morning, and it went down an absolute storm!
After having a lazy morning and checking out of the hotel just before midday, we went down the road for a truly terrible lunch at Café Coffee Day (an Indian chain of coffee shops that can be found everywhere in the country – Hannah’s chicken tandoori sandwich was virtually empty of all filling, and my chicken wrap was warm on the outside and freezing cold in the middle!) Oh well…
Our destination this afternoon was Churchgate railway station, about 30 minutes walk from where we had lunch, and we arrived there just on time to meet a representative of Reality Tours and Travel along with 3 other tourists – we’d booked onto a tour of Dharavi for the afternoon (Mumbai’s most famous slum), and so we all set off on the train towards Mumbai’s most famous slum. After arriving at the right station and nipping across the road for a quick toilet break (because as the guides said, we weren’t going to want to use any in the slums), the five of us were assigned a guide – G2 (that’s not how you spell his name, but it’s how he told us we could remember the pronunciation – he was a very funny guy, Chelsea fan, Sacha Baren Cohen admirer and lover of all Hollywood gangster films!)
The tour itself was absolutely fantastic, and instead of talking about it for pages and pages, here are some of the highlights:
- Dharavi is Mumbai’s second largest slum (with about 20 slums overall in Mumbai). It has a population of 1.3m people, with a density of about 540,000 people per sq. km (yep, you read that right).
- Dharavi has about 10,000 businesses inside it, which turnover about $700m a year – as such, it’s an incredibly successful slum (far more so than the others in Mumbai, which are predominantly just residential).
- Despite Dharavi/slums in general being illegal, the police pretty much leave the place alone, though every now and then they organise raids (with corruption and bribes being the main driver). Interestingly as well, settlements built before 1995 now have some sort of recognised status by the government which (I believe) gives the dwellers ownership of their property.
- On average, a resident of Dharavi shares a toilet with 15,000 other people
- Our first stop was in the Plastic Recycling District – plastic (in many many forms) comes to Dharavi (from all over the world) where it is sorted, ground into chips, washed, repackaged, and sold to non-food-and-drink organisations. Conditions are cramped inside the factories (read poorly lit poorly ventilated rooms), with workers often sleeping on the floor (the business owners don’t live on site, so live-in workers offers them security as well as a place for the workers to stay).
- Working conditions became appalling as we next saw businesses that make the plastic-chipping machines, use dyes and melt scrap metal into aluminium blocks. It was hard to breathe and see just walking through this district, let alone working there.
- Next, we moved on to the Muslim residential area (Muslim and Hindu’s live in separate areas as a result of the 1992/3 violence, which is featured at the start of Slumdog Millionaire, a film about Dharavi). We crawled through some tiny, narrow alleyways (in order that we could get a feel of how cramped the whole place was), there were electrical cables at head height, open sewers in the streets and litter everywhere – quite an experience.
- We also saw a leather-product wholesalers (a small shop in the middle of the slum which was so out of place – AC, a nice desk and fridge, and shelves of good quality leather bags and wallets etc.) Once you stepped outside the shop, you realised where the bags had come from – some businesses close by made the bags, and others dealt with the raw animal skins (you can imagine the smell).
- The final area was one of the Hindu communities, where we saw a typical home for a family (one room, no more than 9 sq. metres, that served as a bedroom, wash room, kitchen, living room etc.) – to rent, it costs £30/mth (the prices are actually quite steep given the success of Dharavi) and to buy the property would cost almost £3000.
- This was also very close to the pottery business area, where clay pots were made in all different shapes and sizes and then packed into huge (very dangerous) kilns that smoked away in the middle of the ‘streets’.
We finished the tour at the Reality Reception centre, where we also got to learn a bit more about what they do – we’d opted out of a slum tour in Nairobi (due to some bad press about how the inhabitants felt about the tours), but I’m incredibly glad we didn’t here. Not only is it a bit different (Dharavi, as G2 said often, has a lot of positives as well as negatives, which I think is unusual for a slum of its size), but by going on the tour we also helped the main charitable arm of the Reality company. 80% of the profits from the tour go towards helping the children of the slum with their English, computer skills etc. In fact, all of the guides (including G2) are residents of Dharavi themselves. We both couldn’t have rated the whole tour highly enough.
The rest of the evening, we journeyed back to our hotel in Mumbai, said goodbye to our tour companions, went back to Pizza Express for another meal (oops), killed some time and had a much needed shower at the hotel and then headed to the train station – despite it being illegal for taxi drivers in Mumbai to not use their meters, we struggled very hard to find one to take us! Then we settled into our train bunks and got ready for our 15 hour journey down to North Goa – it was an interesting journey, but I’ll leave Hannah to tell you about that one in the next post…
That’s all for now – another long post (sorry), but as you can see, it was another packed week and the two Mumbai tours in particular were pretty fascinating. Next up – very little! Lots of beach time and chilling out in Goa, plus our 32hr journey from Goa to Mcleod Ganj…
