North Trip Wrap-Up

Seeing as I leave India a month from today I had better get this trip over.  I leave in five days to go to the Himalayas for two weeks and I have some more I want to say before then.  Well after our extremely Zen desert outing we headed off to another Rajasthani city with a color theme: Jodhpur.  Jodhpur’s buildings are blue, and much more coordinated than Jaipur’s pink.  We visited an enormous fort-turned-museum which had an incredible array of artifacts and substituted audio guides to the real ones.  This actually enhanced the experience because we got to split up and learn as much or as little as we wanted about various pieces of the culture.  We spent several hours wandering the area and it was probably my favorite fort we visited on the trip.  From a landing high in the structure you got a beautiful view of the city and could truly appreciate the blue buildings covering the landscape. 

From our next city, Udaipur, we took a bus to Chittorgarh and its fort.  Though not the most interesting, some of its architecture was covered in remarkable carvings.  There was also a tall tower that was really cramped and took about 15 minutes to climb.  Maybe not worth the effort, but it was an interesting experience to direct a group of 10 people going up and down past many other Indian tourists.  The best part of the day was when we went market shopping and I purchased a cool turban.

Side note on turbans, I think they are really cool.  Besides, each region of India has its own way of styling turbans.  While Rajasthan simply wraps the cloth around your head in a really poofy arrangement, some places leave a two-foot tail running down your back.  Personally, I think Maharashtra has it right.  You may remember feeling really jealous of the beautiful turban creation adorned atop my head for the Ganpati celebrations in September.  This is the traditional Marathi form of wearing a turban, with the tail on the back and the fan-like protrusion in the front.  Turbans take a surprising amount of fabric and were unexpectedly difficult to purchase considering how many people wore them in Rajasthan.  There are also turbans for Sikhs which are smaller, usually black, and have a round bulge in the front that holds some of their hair.  I think these look pretty cool but they are used only religiously and apparently I might upset people.

Anyway, the next day was our last of the tour.  We visited the second largest palace in India which took 450 years to build.  While the architecture and artifacts were intriguing, the experience was really defined by our tour guide.  By far the most humorous and good-natured we have had in all of our trips, this man made the tour really quite fun in addition to educational.  He certainly knew his stuff, but kept interjecting some strange statements that caught our attention.  Here are a few:

“Kill a peacock: three months prison.  Kill a cow: six months prison.  Kill a man: 5,000 rupee fine.”

“Wife died in ’73 at the age of 45 because her husband had polio.”

Upon telling one king had hundreds of wives and no offspring, he told us the spouses were for “kissing and hugging, no more.”

He was quite a character, and a good way to end our day before taking the long train home.

At the end, we made some observations about North India compared to South.  In general the North seems more developed and has better roads and more technology (this is mostly predicated on the fact that most of our hotels on this trip had wifi).  Also, there is significantly more Muslim influence to Moghul invasion and the proximity to Pakistan.  Shopping was cheap at the copious number of markets, and there were many more pure-veg restaurants as well as foreigners. All in all, this was a fantastic trip.  As a group we clicked much better than on South Trip and we were all sad to say goodbye at the close.  Lucky for us, we will see the others again in only a few days for the next trip!